The Parson (Peter Owen Modern Classic) (2 page)

With his good looks, good manners and air of breeding, he might meanwhile have been enjoying a great success with the army ladies. But he’d never had any time for the flirtatious creatures who’d done their best to seduce him. Loyalty would have kept him away from them in any case; loyalty to his brother officers, and, still more, to his family, who had made sacrifices for his career – he valued it far too highly to risk a damaging scandal; and, anyhow, he was not attracted.

Because he always treated the women with the same cool politeness, and because he smoked and drank only in moderation and to be like his comrades, they called him The Parson, and the name stuck, being peculiarly appropriate. Even the men under him used it behind his back. In spite of his good fellowship and his natural zest for living, there really was something faintly priestlike about the fine-looking young man, which showed itself in his conscientiousness and integrity and in his dedicated attitude to the regiment. His little air of seriousness was distinctive and rather winning, and acted almost as an aphrodisiac on the spoiled, blase women, bringing them around him like a swarm of bees.

They couldn’t bear his imperviousness to their attractions. Just how impervious he was they never guessed, for he took care to hide the near-disgust they inspired in him physically, over-sexed as he considered them, over-stimulated by the climate and by good living. They couldn’t leave him alone. But the more they pursued, the more distant he became. He really loathed the occasions when he was forced into contact with them. More than any unpleasant duty, he loathed the dances held at regular intervals, which he avoided at first, reading alone in his quarters, while his comrades disported themselves and conducted their more or less discreet intrigues.

The women were, of course, greatly in the minority, even the plainest of them much in demand; but the plethora of young partners didn’t compensate for Oswald; they couldn’t do without him. Finally they got the Colonel to assert his authority, on the grounds that for a junior officer to make himself conspicuous by not dancing showed intolerable conceit, and endangered regimental morale.

Ordered to attend, Oswald did so with the impeccable correctness with which he carried out all his duties, dancing with formal precision with each partner in turn, apportioning his time with scrupulous fairness, so that they all got equal shares. He hated the women now more than ever for forcing him to dance with them; hating above all things to feel, against his hard, fit, muscular body, their soft, yielding semi-nakedness, which always seemed to exude a lustful excitement repugnant to him beyond words. However, he had been given an order, so he had to obey it; always very correct, impersonal, as indifferent to his partner of the moment as if she’d been some piece of military equipment. At first this only inflamed his adorers. Yet, really, it
was
insulting, the way he let it be seen he hardly knew one of them from another. Circling the room with an expressionless face, holding the woman in his arms well away from him, he seemed to insult the very flesh of his partner. It was his way of getting his own back.

It was not unsuccessful. But he had to pay for it. In the long run it reacted against him. Though the husbands began by sniggering at the discomfiture of the wives they knew were unfaithful, they soon started to resent the implied insult to themselves – these, after all, were the women
they’d
chosen. And presently, when the women realized that Oswald never would succumb to their seductions, they turned nasty, trying to make trouble for him with their menfolk, creating unpleasant scenes, for which he, of course, got the blame. On the whole, he’d have aroused much less ill-feeling by presenting a new pair of horns all round. What would it have mattered, with the antlers they all wore already?

Since his virtue had made everybody uncomfortable, there was a consequent general withdrawing, a cooling-off towards him, his popularity in the mess suffered a sharp decline, and his nickname, The Parson, came to be used more as a sneer. The really senior officers still thought highly of him; the CO, particularly, valued his dedicated attitude which belonged to a past generation of soldiers, already almost extinct. The older women too remained friends with him, and he with them. There was nothing of the woman-hater in his temperament. On the contrary, it was his idealized notion of womanhood that made the promiscuous sexiness of the young wives so repulsive to him.

For his age, time and position, he was singularly innocent – it was part of his charm – without being in any way prudish, priggish or epicene. His attitude towards sex was rather romantic; he had too much regard for it to degrade it by sordid little affairs and mean escapades. He wasn’t a virgin, but confined his activities to the meek brown women smuggled intermittently into the officers’ quarters. And there was always the sublimation of exercise. Often, at the end of an exacting day, while his companions relaxed over their drinks, he would be out on his sweating polo pony on the parched
maidan
, practising alone in a cloud of dust, until it got too dark to see the ball.

The army was everything to him, any other sort of existence unthinkable. As long as he’d been accepted in friendliness by his equals, he’d lived untroubled, unthinking, content with his humble but essential place in the structure of the regiment. Only now, in the time of his unpopularity, he began to feel lonely and dissatisfied. He’d given himself absolutely to the discipline of the regiment, and his loyalty couldn’t be shaken. But simply to know he was doing his duty seemed not to be enough. His former thoughtless, almost childish content was no longer possible. He had to think about the way he’d been made to feel isolated, different from his companions; and, as soon as he started thinking, he saw that they’d turned against him unfairly, simply because he’d kept to his principles.

He’d never been lonely before. Good-natured as he was, equable and a natural athlete, popularity had always been his as a matter of course. A slight unconscious sense of inferiority on account of his northern origin had prevented him from making any close friends in the regiment – inevitably he was out of touch with the ideas and opinions the others freely expressed. But, really, he’d felt no need of intimacy, existing always in a group. He’d been satisfied with the rather desultory superficial contact he had with his comrades. Now, suddenly, this was lost to him, he was left stranded.

He assumed indifference and assurance to cover his loneliness. His physical condition was perfect, and nobody must suspect that there was anything wrong with him inwardly. Since he was not introspective, his unsatisfactory state remained for the most part unthought about, undefined. But he knew that all was not well with him. Gradually he developed a nameless sort of yearning, a vague dream of easement, never put into words. And sometimes, listening, under the hot evening sky, to the men singing sentimental songs he had heard at home, he felt restless and sad, stirred by his vague longings.

Only a woman, he knew instinctively, could satisfy them; but none of those accessible to him were sympathetic; so his confused, inarticulate unhappiness became fixed, tolerable because of its definite limitation. Everything would come right again when he went on leave, back to his home and to his mother, he was sure of that. He had always been perfectly happy to spend all his free time with her, never wanting anyone else, even after he’d joined the regiment.

Throughout the voyage home he was dreaming of her, looking forward to their meeting; to a renewal of their close mutual understanding.

Yet, just precisely this time, when he came back after the years of absence, needing her more than he’d ever done since childhood, there seemed no understanding, everything was changed.
She
seemed changed, older, further away; they seemed to have grown apart. He found he could no longer confide in her as in the past. It was a terrible disappointment to him. He was left with his undefined grievance, his dissatisfaction, of which he became much more conscious, without the distraction of duty and discipline that had kept him going.

All at once, his predicament seemed far more grave, since he could see no end to it. And it seemed so unfair, when all the time he’d been doing his duty in uncongenial circumstances – as a northerner, he’d always hated the tropical heat. Surely he deserved something, after the years of exile? Something of the dream that had touched him when the soldiers sang in the brief moment before the night, and the smoke rose in straight lines, diaphanous, pungent, into the cloudless sky?

His dream was too indefinite to put into words; perhaps no more than the desire to feel at ease again in his life; he knew only that it had failed to materialize. And his home, where nothing was as he had so confidently expected and believed it would be, had failed him.

His brothers had grown up and departed to various jobs; two of his sisters were married and living in distant towns. That left only Vera, the most intelligent and least attractive of the girls, the one he liked least, the one doomed, apparently, to a life of frustration as companion of his mother in her declining years.

As soon as the excitement of his arrival was over, disappointment engulfed him. Since the contact with his mother was broken and couldn’t be mended, there seemed no point in their being together. In spite of their mutual love, the years relentlessly kept them apart. When he answered her questions, he was all the while conscious that she really wanted something more personal than the objective account of his travels that was all he could, or would, give her, feeling – without ever quite allowing the thought to form – that this was all of him she was now able to understand.

His home was very isolated, high up on the moors, miles from any large town. There were no distractions, apart from a few boring visits to scattered neighbours. As things were, he could see no sense in staying on there, and began to make vague plans for getting away.

His sister meant very little to him, a big serious girl who seldom spoke, and whose presence he accepted very much as he accepted the furniture he had known all his life; until she astonished him by saying she knew what he had in mind – it was just like him to go off to enjoy himself, leaving her stuck here with her mother on this godforsaken moor.

Startled by her criticism, Oswald told himself she was warped and bitter because she’d been condemned, practically, as the last unmarried girl, to stay here as long as the old woman lived. But it was such a commonplace of their society, it was always happening, he couldn’t take it very seriously. Her bitterness, anyway, seemed excessive; and why should it be directed against him?

It took him some time longer to find out that what Vera really resented was his acceptance of the money essential to his career, which she helped her mother to earn by doing odd jobs of sewing and preserving and so on, for their richer acquaintances. He’d never even thought about it before. The family tradition required the eldest son to enter his regiment, which necessitated a private income of some kind: therefore an income must be provided for him – it was as simple as that – and, if it could be provided in no other way, so it must be. Now appalling vistas of doubt opened up.

His sister said frankly that it annoyed her to see him taking everything as his right – he should realize what was being done for him – and now let the subject drop. Neither of them ever mentioned it again. But of course it went on working in Oswald’s mind. Not only had he been made to feel guilty but put under an obligation he could neither end nor discharge, since he couldn’t think of leaving the army.

So much for his idea of going away, which now became impossible, an act of monstrous ingratitude he could not contemplate for a moment. Instead, he rather grimly set himself to make amends, devoting himself to his mother, trying to please her in everything.

But it was not a success. Consciously, the old lady understood nothing of what was going on under the surface: though she was grateful and proud to be seen about with her handsome son, so much attention embarrassed her. Feeling the hidden strain, she would have preferred to be treated in the old offhand way that seemed natural to her, and left at home.

Oswald’s efforts began to seem rather futile, as it became clear that he was unable to make her happy – his own unspoken grievances saw to that, making him feel on edge, so that he experienced more and more often the irritation that had twitched at his nerves when she spoke of Rejane.

*

Her presence was a point of anxiety in him now, preventing his thought from concentrating upon the unknown woman across the room. For a second, when he glanced at the stranger, his dream seemed to hover near, an indescribable brightness, spreading wings of promise, of peace. All he wanted was to sit quietly near the woman who had evoked his dream. But, all the time, he had to consider his mother. At any moment she would start fussing, saying they must start for home.

Suddenly a soldier’s automatic awareness of weather conditions made him look out of the window. A peculiar blanching and blurring process was obscuring the light outside. The sun was paling, a curious dimming was everywhere apparent, pallor was diffusing itself into the air, smudging the shapes and stealing the colours of the garden flowers. Eclipsed to a pale lamp, the sun abruptly went out altogether; the cliff withdrew from sight. Only a few of the flowers in the foreground still floated, dim and derealized, colourless ghosts of themselves, in the thick white mist billowing up from the invisible water, which could be heard softly sucking and smacking the rocks below.