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.