The Parson (Peter Owen Modern Classic) Read online

  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 ferocio
us 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 w
as 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.