The Parson (Peter Owen Modern Classic) Read online

  His mother was a little bewildered by these rapid developments. She’d have liked to keep the son she adored to herself, for a time at least. But whatever he wanted was right, and she wanted it too. Though slightly overawed by the beauty and obvious wealth of this new acquaintance, she was ready to make friends, accepting Rejane as she’d have accepted a Hottentot, had Oswald wished it; for he was her idol, and his will was law.

  2

  SO the improbable relationship started between the young officer and the guest at The Hope Deferred, the unworldly devoted mother hovering very much in the background. The young man was supremely happy. The situation was just what he wanted, exactly what seemed needed for his happiness. At last he could get rid of that awful sense of being isolated and injured. His dream at last took a definite shape and he knew what he wanted, which, of course, was Rejane.

  As if the forces of nature really were on his side, there was no more fog or rain, no more thundery heat, but a long sequence of brisk, bright autumn days, just the weather he liked best, when the moors looked their best. And, as this fine weather seemed sent to compensate for the bad summer, Oswald believed that his former unlucky period had been succeeded by one more fortunate, when virtue would be rewarded instead of penalized, according to what he’d been taught.

  Uplifted by a mixture of pride, happiness and excitement, he drove Rejane to lunch at his home. He was aware, as he had not been for a long time, of the sheer joy of being alive, and of the beauty of the day and of the world. It gave him intense pleasure to drive through the pale, thin, autumn sunshine, with her sitting beside him, as serene and lovely as the sky itself, talking as easily as if they’d been old friends. It seemed to him that everyone they passed on the road – most of them people he’d known all his life – must be envying him and admiring his companion.

  Out of his pride a more elusive feeling grew up which he couldn’t have named. It made him regard her rather as though she were a royal princess who had been entrusted to his care. When, after gazing at the enormous view, floating in floods of luminous sunshine, she exclaimed, ‘How lovely it is here!’, at the same time lightly touching his arm, a tremor of deep emotion went through him. He longed to press her hand to his lips, but found that he derived even more satisfaction from not doing so, proud to feel himself trusted, looking at her with respect and profound devotion. At the same time, something impelled him to wonder how much of the beautiful day would be left to him if she were not there. He realized suddenly, almost with alarm, that his own heightened enjoyment was due to her presence, and to the unspoken intimacy that seemed to be growing between them.

  *

  They drove at first through a sheltered valley where summer still lingered, a sprinkling of yellow leaves hardly noticeable in the dense green of the big trees, oaks, ashes and elms. Towards midday the sun was still strong, and they passed whole families round the scattered farmsteads, bringing in the last crop of the season.

  Then, as the road climbed up to the moors, the softer characteristics of the landscape gradually vanished, widening stretches of heath alternating with rough, dry-walled fields, until all cultivation ceased. Here, on the higher more exposed ground, the bracken was turning gold, and, from thickets of slighter trees, birches and aspens, leaves came spinning down in golden showers.

  Soon a sea of silence, sunshine and solitude stretched around them in every direction to the tors, bunched spectrally on the horizon, the undulating expanse of heather and pale, plumy grass breaking out here and there in sprays of purple and golden brown. Trees became fewer and fewer, there were more and more outcroppings of pale granite: and to this sunlit desert the sudden brilliant flash of water came startlingly, like a vision. Ghostly looking yet monumental, the distant tors seemed to float in the sky; while lesser, nearer masses of stone and boulders were strewn about everywhere, some quite near the road, their pockets full of delicate little ferns and cushions of emerald velvet moss. Always climbing, the road grew rougher and narrower, finally reduced to a stony track, along which the powerful car – hired for the duration of Oswald’s leave – swayed and jolted uneasily. It was quite impossible to keep up any speed.

  Rejane looked about, rather amazed to find herself so far outside civilization, though Oswald had already explained that he lived near the last village of all, beyond which there were no roads, and that this one came to an end at his house.

  ‘Nearly there,’ he now told her, smiling and reassuring.

  There was something oddly comforting in the way he seemed to watch over her all the time, always watchful for her wellbeing, standing guard over her, with perfect correctness and old-fashioned courtesy – courtliness, rather – surrounding her with his warm masculine kindliness and protective devotion, which was really rather charming. And there was something else about it, more important to her than charm.

  *

  Her pleasing unaffected façade, the pretence that all her beauty and wealth made her no different from other people, concealed the implacable underside of her character, and an obsession with self that was truly phenomenal. Some lingering narcissism left over from her solitary childhood had combined with the universal admiration she’d received later to create in her mind a glorified self-image. With a part of her, anyhow, she half believed in herself as a kind of superior being, almost as though she possessed supernatural powers. The real power, of course, was the power of her money, as her rational self knew quite well. But she’d played all her life at being a queen or an enchantress in secret, so that it almost seemed true. Oswald’s reverential attitude was important because it played up to this unreal reality and made it seem more like truth. She’d never before met anyone who flattered her dream-self as he did, so that she really felt she belonged on a pedestal or a throne. To feel his male deference paying tribute to her all the time, with a sort of knightly chivalry, was immensely gratifying to her obsession.

  But, as her rational self, she wanted to laugh at the strange young man who was falling in love with such solemn intensity. She knew he was already in love with her by his reaction to her touch; which also suggested that he was afraid of love in the physical sense, and so made her into a goddess to be worshipped from far away. It was just what her queenly enchantress-self wanted, but her real self almost burst out laughing; she, Rejane, to be worshipped from afar – it was too funny ...

  Quick as the darting of a snake’s tongue, she darted at him a sidelong glance of cynical southern disillusionment, a look of somewhat sinister mischief flickering on her face, which, for that instant, for all its loveliness, looked malevolent, witchlike.

  That there was something witchlike about her, Oswald’s instinct had told him, warning him off. He had ignored the warning, already infatuated by this dangerous charmer; but if he’d seen that inhuman look of mocking, cold-blooded amusement, his chivalrous soul might have taken fright. However, he was unsuspecting and saw nothing. Not for one moment did he suspect what he was bringing with him as, turning a sharp comer, he pointed upwards and on to his home.

  At the gesture, and his exalted expression, Rejane, not quite out of her witch-self, exclaimed silently, ‘Excelsior!’ – the look of heartless mockery flickering again. But immediately afterwards she was surprised into a very different frame of mind.

  Still climbing, they’d been for the last few minutes in a cleft between stony slopes of heather and bracken, nothing else to be seen; she’d no idea they were near the summit. So she was disconcerted to see, straight above them, the hoary grey head of rock, thrust into, and filling the sky. Taking her by surprise, the bare upheaval of naked granite, grim and overwhelming in its immensity and nearness, had a strong effect on her imagination. She’d never been close to one of the tors; and, to her surprised eyes, there was something extraordinary about that huge knot of pale, up-ended stones, towering aggressively just overhead, like a fortress, excluding the sun.

  The track curved, crumpled folds of distant moorland reappeared, other tors rearing up dimly, one behind anot
her, rocky islands in the vast sunlit sea. But always this near mass of granite loomed close above, between them and the sun, too close, it seemed to her – it made a chilling impression. Though there was nothing here to compare with the scenic grandeurs she’d seen in various parts of the globe, the unexpectedness of it impressed her. What a weird place, she thought, and, connecting it with the man at her side, What a truly astounding place to call home! – meaning the pile of boulders up there, not the house she hadn’t yet seen.

  Her imagination was already at work weaving the tor into a fantasy of her own; she had to do this, or it would seem too overpowering. She was thinking that nature, surely, had never produced that heap of rocks, which looked clumsy and awkwardly balanced, and to her had an eerie, impossible aspect, unlike the work of man, either – more like some half-wit giant’s attempt at building. Her dramatic eye saw it as the product of an unsuccessful experiment in evolution, as if an extinct race of crazy titans had left this evidence of their failure before perishing from the earth. She actually seemed to feel the lingering emanation of their resentment. Evoked by her imagination, an aura of ancient malice seemed to cling, even now, to the gruesome great stones. By substituting her own invention, this ghostly malevolence of prehistory, she came to terms with whatever it was had impressed her.

  ‘How do you like our tor?’ Oswald asked, turning his blond head to beam at her warmly and protectively – he might as well have beamed protectively at a tiger.

  ‘Wonderful!’ she smiled back, amused by him again. He seemed so blissfully unaware of her as she really was. But she was curious, too. There was the element of mystery about him – how could there not be, bom and bred as he had been in the shadow of that mysterious house of demons up there? She’d only just seen his house, on top of a smaller hill in the foreground, because of the dominant effect of the crag, standing straight above it. It was built of the same pale stone and looked cold and forbidding, but was overshadowed, actually and metaphorically, in spite of its size and position, by the other ominous edifice higher up.

  In front, a wilderness of a neglected garden ran downhill to a shallow, fast-running brown stream, glinting among its stones; and directly behind, the moor jutted steeply, crowned by those weirdly piled rocks, which Rejane had endowed with the spells of prehuman erectors. Her fantasy had the side-effect of making Oswald more interesting, more of a puzzle to her. She couldn’t imagine what sort of man he could be, having lived in the shade of that antique malice; but she meant to find out.

  She said no more to him then. And he was satisfied, for he saw that she was impressed, and knew intuitively that what impressed her was the atmosphere of the place, for which he himself had such a strong feeling. As a child, he’d always been fascinated by the old stories about the moor. Something of childhood magic lived on in him even now, though he could never have expressed the sense of wonder, of something heroic, splendid and remote, that so entranced him, like a glimpse of a legendary, lost golden age. He’d never spoken about it to anyone, not even to his mother, always feeling no one would understand. It seemed miraculous, and yet perfectly natural, that Rejane should come straight into his secret world, where all was silent, dreamlike, beyond description. Her silence was perfect to him, his own thoughts could not have been spoken. He drove in a kind of ecstatic trance, while she amused herself with her race of imaginary premen, half magicians, but doomed to extinction because their development had taken a wrong twist. Their resentment had spun a venomous web of magic to last as long as the rock into which they’d infused it. The story she’d invented already seemed real – her new pretence-life, it was to be.

  It was strange, she was so assured and poised, her confidence seemed unshakeable. Yet she had occasional rare moments of insecurity. She liked a man to stand between her and the world, to relieve her of its full impact. In the same way, she preferred acting a part to real living – imaginary worlds being more manageable than the real one. But the deception was barely conscious. Once her mind had accepted a pretence, it became her reality, for the time being. So now the world she had left behind began to seem hazy, unreal. Even the lover’s face became indistinct. Though she had no intention of losing him, for the present he faded out, replaced by this northern world, so entirely different, with the tor looming ominous in the sky, and her ghostly prehumans.

  Oswald of course was to introduce her to this strange north; the icy, demonic, alien north she so far only imagined as lying in wait, like a presence, behind the superficial appearance of civilization. She’d endowed him with some of her invented magic, which must have entered into him, living in the shadow of those old stones. That was why he was able, as no one else ever had been, to make her feel a princess. So it all fitted together.

  She would act with him, outside her normal existence, a brief interlude, based on the mystique of the moor, all rather uncanny in the hushed northern strangeness. But of its essence only an interlude, nothing lasting about it. She’d found out that he was due to return to duty in just over a month, so that was all right. She could put in a month as a sort of poetic child of the northern moors quite happily. And the lover would wait that long. Let him wait. It would teach him a lesson.

  So, without his knowledge, Oswald’s fate was decided. As though feeling her thoughts upon him, he turned his head, but at once had to look back at the road.

  He was very much the gallant, chivalrous lover, and quick as a woman, almost, to detect her moods. In his deep-blue eyes, which were incapable of deception, could be read an endless tenderness and devotion; though whether he’d ever dare to approach her as a man was open to doubt. It didn’t matter. She always rather shrank from a man, physically, though she’d taught herself to enjoy the embraces of men. What was much more important to her at the moment was the glimpse she’d just caught of that incongruous sort of misgivinga curious hollow look of uncertainty which was a puzzle to her, and a stronger attraction than all his good looks and other qualities put together.

  *

  The car tilted over a humpback bridge, crossing the stream, flat stepping-stones at the side for people on foot to cross the brown busy water – like crossing into the Middle Ages, it seemed to Rejane – and climbed steeply on between jungles of flowering plants gone back to the wild, convolvulus smothering everything, blowing its trumpets triumphantly everywhere after the wet season, although its leaves were already beginning to droop and wither, touched by the frost.

  The house seemed not only at the end of the road but at the end of the world. The engine of the car was switched off and silence descended, into which Rejane stepped out – into this absolute northern silence, timeless, as if everything had stopped, and they’d come, not to the Middle Ages but to a place before time began. If there was a village near it must have been on the other side of the hill, for not a single habitation was visible in the whole huge encirclement of the moors.

  In miles, the distance they’d come from The Hope Deferred wasn’t very great; yet everything here seemed oddly different, changed. Besides the new silence and solitude, there was a new coolness. The upland air was sharp, even in sunshine. And that the place had already turned towards winter was evident, not only in the overgrown garden but in the pale sear grass slope above, reaching up, between frequent knots and ridges of granite, to the pale looming mass of stone; and in the faint blue, hardly blue at all, of the sky.

  In its silence, particularly, the vast, pale, deserted landscape, with its bare islands of ghostly rock, seemed to her to exhale something hostile to human life, stony and arid, without sound or movement, a lifeless and empty scene. In the almost frightening silence she saw the house as the advance-post of some doomed expedition, recklessly daring the curse of that wintry region, already lying upon it in the shadow of the rocks overhead, balanced in precarious-seeming immensity, threatening to fall and crush it out of existence.

  But the interior of the house was less romantic, merely gloomy and dark, with the peculiar petrified gloom of houses that have known
better days, where people live in the past. The cold rooms seemed damp, and gave the impression of being arranged as they had been twenty or more years before. The furniture was massive, dark and heavy, the pictures hung darkly and obscurely upon the walls, between military trophies, banners, helmets, sabres; the rust on the steel looked like bloodstains, the dusty, bedraggled plumes on the helmets suggested that the curse had come home to roost.

  In this dismal atmosphere the lunch wasn’t very successful, though Rejane was charming as usual. And the old lady did her best, ingenuously, childishly chattering about people and things the visitor had never heard of; until she forgot, and sat staring blankly, out of those queer psychic eyes that seemed to see only ghosts. Then, with a guilty glance at Oswald, she would start up again, scattering her inconsequent sentences into a gulf of incomprehension thousands of miles across.

  They were an odd trio of women sitting at lunch, around the correct, handsome young man. The dreamy-eyed mother seemed scarcely present, despite her spasms of conversation. And he was there only for Rejane. His sister, tall, flushed, with an air of suppressed resentment, made frequent trips to the kitchen, hardly saying a word.

  The elegant, worldly Rejane sat through the meal in her amused casual fashion, finding it all rather boring, rather an imposition. Why should she, who must never be bored, put up with these absurd people? Oswald should have known better than to bring her here.

  She was thankful when the meal was over at last, and they could go, leaving the house with almost indecent haste. Once she was alone in the car with him, her habitual good humour returning, she could smile at the memory of those cold, disastrous rooms.

  Although to the man they were simply ‘home’, a background he wouldn’t have dreamed of criticizing on his own account, so familiar he never really looked at them, he had seen that they were not for her. He at once proposed that in future they should meet at the hotel; a far better arrangement from his point of view, its great advantage being that he’d have her to himself, instead of having to share her with his mother and sister. Thank goodness for the fast car, and the freedom it gave him.