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[Illustration: frontispiece]
THE RETURN
OF THE SOLDIER
BY
REBECCA WEST
NEW [Illustration: colophon] YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1918,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER
-C-
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
He lay there in the confiding relaxation of
a child _Frontispiece_
FACING
PAGE
"Give it a brush now and then, like a good
soul" 6
She would get into the four-foot punt that
was used as a ferry and bring it over very
slowly 66
"I oughtn't to do it, ought I?" 176
THE RETURN
OF THE SOLDIER
CHAPTER I
"Ah, don't begin to fuss!" wailed Kitty. "If a woman began to worry in
these days because her husband hadn't written to her for a fortnight!
Besides, if he'd been anywhere interesting, anywhere where the fighting
was really hot, he'd have found some way of telling me instead of just
leaving it as 'Somewhere in France.' He'll be all right."
We were sitting in the nursery. I had not meant to enter it again, now
that the child was dead; but I had come suddenly on Kitty as she slipped
the key into the lock, and I had lingered to look in at the high room,
so full of whiteness and clear colors, so unendurably gay and familiar,
which is kept in all respects as though there were still a child in the
house. It was the first lavish day of spring, and the sunlight was
pouring through the tall, arched windows and the flowered curtains so
brightly that in the old days a fat fist would certainly have been
raised to point out the new, translucent glories of the rosebud.
Sunlight was lying in great pools on the blue cork floor and the soft
rugs, patterned with strange beasts, and threw dancing beams, which
should have been gravely watched for hours, on the white paint and the
blue distempered walls. It fell on the rocking-horse, which had been
Chris's idea of an appropriate present for his year-old son, and showed
what a fine fellow he was and how tremendously dappled; it picked out
Mary and her little lamb on the chintz ottoman. And along the
mantelpiece, under the loved print of the snarling tiger, in attitudes
that were at once angular and relaxed, as though they were ready for
play at their master's pleasure, but found it hard to keep from drowsing
in this warm weather, sat the Teddy Bear and the chimpanzee and the
woolly white dog and the black cat with eyes that roll. Everything was
there except Oliver. I turned away so that I might not spy on Kitty
revisiting her dead. But she called after me:
"Come here, Jenny. I'm going to dry my hair." And when I looked again I
saw that her golden hair was all about her shoulders and that she wore
over her frock a little silken jacket trimmed with rosebuds. She looked
so like a girl on a magazine cover that one expected to find a large "15
cents" somewhere attached to her person. She had taken Nanny's big
basket-chair from its place by the high-chair, and was pushing it over
to the middle window. "I always come in here when Emery has washed my
hair. It's the sunniest room in the house. I wish Chris wouldn't have
it kept as a nursery when there's no chance--" She sat down, swept her
hair over the back of the chair into the sunlight, and held out to me
her tortoiseshell hair-brush. "Give it a brush now and then, like a good
soul; but be careful. Tortoise snaps so!"
I took the brush and turned to the window, leaning my forehead against
the glass and staring unobservantly at the view. You probably know the
beauty of that view; for when Chris rebuilt Baldry Court after his
marriage he handed it over to architects who had not so much the wild
eye of the artist as the knowing wink of the manicurist, and between
them they massaged the dear old place into matter for innumerable
photographs in the illustrated papers. The house lies on the crest of
Harrowweald, and from its windows the eye drops to miles of emerald
pasture-land lying wet and brilliant under a westward line of sleek
hills; blue with distance and distant woods, while nearer it range the
suave decorum of the lawn and the Lebanon cedar, the branches of which
are like darkness made palpable, and the minatory gauntnesses of the
topmost pines in the wood that breaks downward, its bare boughs a close
texture of browns and purples, from the pond on the edge of the hill.
[Illustration: "Give it a brush now and then, like a good soul"]
That day its beauty was an affront to me, because, like most
Englishwomen of my time, I was wishing for the return of a soldier.
Disregarding the national interest and everything else except the keen
prehensile gesture of our hearts toward him, I wanted to snatch my
Cousin Christopher from the wars and seal him in this green pleasantness
his wife and I now looked upon. Of late I had had bad dreams about him.
By nights I saw Chris running across the brown rottenness of
No-Man's-Land, starting back here because he trod upon a hand, not even
looking there because of the awfulness of an unburied head, and not till
my dream was packed full of horror did I see him pitch forward on his
knees as he reached safety, if it was that. For on the war-films I have
seen men slip down as softly from the trench-parapet, and none but the
grimmer philosophers could say that they had reached safety by their
fall. And when I escaped into wakefulness it was only to lie stiff and
think of stories I had heard in the boyish voice of the modern
subaltern, which rings indomitable, yet has most of its gay notes
flattened: "We were all of us in a barn one night, and a shell came
along. My pal sang out, 'Help me, old man; I've got no legs!' and I had
to answer, 'I can't, old man; I've got no hands!'" Well, such are the
dreams of Englishwomen to-day. I could not complain, but I wished for
the return of our soldier. So I said:
"I wish we could hear from Chris. It is a fortnight since he wrote."
And then it was that Kitty wailed, "Ah, don't begin to fuss!" and bent
over her image in a hand-mirror as one might bend for refreshment over
scented flowers.
I tried to build about me such a little globe of ease as always
ensphered her, and thought of all that remained good in our lives though
Chris was gone. I was sure that we were preserved from the reproach of
luxury, because we had made a fine place for Chris, one little part of
the world that was, so far as surfaces could make it so, good enough for
his amazing goodness. Here we had nourished that surpassing amiability
which was so habitual that one took it as one of his physical
characteristics, and regarded any lapse into bad temper as a calamity as
startling as the breaking of a leg; here we had made happiness
inevitable for him. I could shut my eyes and think of innumerable
proofs of how well we had succeeded, for there never was so visibly
contented a man. And I recalled all that he did one morning just a year
ago when he went to the front.
First he had sat in the morning-room and talked and stared out on the
lawns that already had the desolation of an empty stage, although he had
not yet gone; then broke off suddenly and went about the house, looking
into many rooms. He went to the stables and looked at the horses and had
the dogs brought out; he refrained from touching them or speaking to
them, as though he felt himself already infected with the squalor of war
and did not want to contaminate their bright physical well-being. Then
he went to the edge of the wood and stood staring down into the clumps
of dark-leaved rhododendrons and the yellow tangle of last year's
bracken and the cold winter black of the trees. (From this very window I
had spied on him.) Then he moved broodingly back to the house to be
with his wife until the moment of his going, when Kitty and I stood on
the steps to see him motor off to Waterloo. He kissed us both. As he
bent over me I noticed once again how his hair was of two colors, brown
and gold. Then he got into the car, put on his Tommy air, and said: "So
long! I'll write you from Berlin!" and as he spoke his head dropped
back, and he set a hard stare on the house. That meant, I knew, that he
loved the life he had lived with us and desired to carry with him to the
dreary place of death and dirt the complete memory of everything about
his home, on which his mind could brush when things were at their worst,
as a man might finger an amulet through his shirt. This house, this life
with us, was the core of his heart.
"If he could come back!" I said. "He was so happy here!"
And Kitty answered:
"He could not have been happier."
It was important that he should have been happy, for, you see, he was
not like other city men. When we had played together as children in that
wood he had always shown great faith in the imminence of the improbable.
He thought that the birch-tree would really stir and shrink and quicken
into an enchanted princess, that he really was a red Indian, and that
his disguise would suddenly fall from him at the right sundown, that at
any moment a tiger might lift red fangs through the bracken, and he
expected these things with a stronger motion of the imagination than the
ordinary child's make-believe. And from a thousand intimations, from his
occasional clear fixity of gaze on good things as though they were about
to dissolve into better, from the passionate anticipation with which he
went to new countries or met new people, I was aware that this faith had
persisted into his adult life. He had exchanged his expectation of
becoming a red Indian for the equally wistful aspiration of becoming
completely reconciled to life. It was his hopeless hope that some time
he would have an experience that would act on his life like alchemy,
turning to gold all the dark metals of events, and from that revelation
he would go on his way rich with an inextinguishable joy. There had
been, of course, no chance of his ever getting it. Literally there
wasn't room to swing a revelation in his crowded life. First of all, at
his father's death he had been obliged to take over a business that was
weighted by the needs of a mob of female relatives who were all useless
either in the old way, with antimacassars, or in the new way, with
golf-clubs; then Kitty had come along and picked up his conception of
normal expenditure, and carelessly stretched it as a woman stretches a
new glove on her hand. Then there had been the difficult task of
learning to live after the death of his little son. It had lain on us,
the responsibility, which gave us dignity, to compensate him for his
lack of free adventure by arranging him a gracious life. But now, just
because our performance had been so brilliantly adequate, how dreary was
the empty stage!
We were not, perhaps, specially contemptible women, because nothing
could ever really become a part of our life until it had been referred
to Chris's attention. I remember thinking, as the parlor-maid came in
with a card on the tray, how little it mattered who had called and what
flag of prettiness or wit she flew, since there was no chance that Chris
would come in and stand over her, his fairness red in the firelight, and
show her that detached attention, such as an unmusical man pays to good
music, which men of anchored affections give to attractive women.
Kitty read from the card:
"'Mrs. William Grey, Mariposa, Ladysmith Road, Wealdstone,' I don't know
anybody in _Wealdstone_." That is the name of the red suburban stain
which fouls the fields three miles nearer London than Harrowweald. One
cannot now protect one's environment as one once could. "Do I know her,
Ward? Has she been here before?"
"Oh, no, ma'am." The parlor-maid smiled superciliously. "She said she
had news for you." From her tone one could deduce an over-confiding
explanation made by a shabby visitor while using the door-mat almost too
zealously.
Kitty pondered, then said:
"I'll come down." As the girl went, Kitty took up the amber hair-pins
from her lap and began swathing her hair about her head. "Last year's
fashion," she commented; "but I fancy it'll do for a person with that
sort of address." She stood up, and threw her little silk
dressing-jacket over the rocking-horse. "I'm seeing her because she may
need something, and I specially want to be kind to people while Chris is
away. One wants to deserve well of heaven." For a minute she was aloof
in radiance, but as we linked arms and went out into the corridor she
became more mortal, with a pout. "The people that come breaking into
one's nice, quiet day!" she moaned reproachfully, and as we came to the
head of the broad stair-case she leaned over the white balustrade to
peer down on the hall, and squeezed my arm. "Look!" she whispered.
Just beneath us, in one of Kitty's prettiest chintz arm-chairs, sat a
middle-aged woman. She wore a yellowish raincoat and a black hat with
plumes. The sticky straw hat had only lately been renovated by something
out of a little bottle bought at the chemist's. She had rolled her black
thread gloves into a ball on her lap, so that she could turn her gray
alpaca skirt well above her muddy boots and adjust its brush-braid with
a seamed red hand that looked even more worn when she presently raised
it to touch the glistening flowers of the pink azalea that stood on a
table beside her. Kitty shivered, then muttered:
"Let's get this over," and ran down the stairs. On the last step she
paused and said with conscientious sweetness, "Mrs. Grey!"
"Yes," answered the visitor. She lifted to Kitty a sallow and relaxed
face the expression of which gave me a sharp, pitying pang of
prepossession in her favor: it was beautiful that so plain a woman
should so ardently rejoice in another's loveliness. "Are you Mrs.
Baldry?" she asked, almost as if she were glad about it, and stood up.
The bones of her bad stays clicked as she moved. Well, she was not so
bad. Her body was long and round and shapely, and with a noble
squareness of the shoulders; her fair hair curled diffidently about a
good brow; her gray eyes, though they were remote, as if anything worth
looking at in her life had kept a long way off, were full of tenderness;
and though she was slender, there was something about her of the
wholesome, endearing heaviness of the ox or the trusted big dog. Yet she
was bad enough. She was repulsively furred with neglect and poverty, as
even a good glove that has dropped down behind a bed in a hotel and has
lain undisturbed for a day or two is repulsive when the chambermaid
retrieves it from the dust and fluff.
She flung at us as we sat down:
"My general maid is sister to your second housemaid."
It left us at a loss.
"You've come about a reference?" asked Kitty.
"Oh, no. I've had Gladys two years now, and I've always found her a very
good girl. I want no reference." With her finger-nail she followed the
burst seam of the dark pigskin purse that slid about on her shiny alpaca
lap. "But girls talk, you know. You mustn't blame them." She seemed to
be caught in a thicket of embarrassment, and sat staring up at the
azalea.
With the hardness of a woman who sees before her the curse of women's
lives, a domestic row, Kitty said that she took no interest in servants'
gossip.
"Oh, it isn't--" her eyes brimmed as though we had been
unkind--"servants' gossip that I wanted to talk about. I only mentioned
Gladys"--she continued to trace the burst seam of her purse--"because
that's how I heard you didn't know."
"What don't I know?"
Her head drooped a little.
"About Mr. Baldry. Forgive me, I don't know his rank."
"Captain Baldry," supplied Kitty, wonderingly. "What is it that I don't
know?"
She looked far away from us, to the open door and its view of dark pines
and pale March sunshine, and appeared to swallow something.
"Why, that he's hurt," she gently said.
"Wounded, you mean?" asked Kitty.
Her rusty plumes oscillated as she moved her mild face about with an air
of perplexity.
"Yes," she said, "he's wounded."
Kitty's bright eyes met mine, and we obeyed that mysterious human
impulse to smile triumphantly at the spectacle of a fellow-creature
occupied in baseness. For this news was not true. It could not possibly
be true. The War Office would have wired to us immediately if Chris had
been wounded. This was such a fraud as one sees recorded in the papers
that meticulously record squalor in paragraphs headed, "Heartless Fraud
on Soldier's Wife." Presently she would say that she had gone to some
expense to come here with her news and that she was poor, and at the
first generous look on our faces there would come some tale of trouble
that would disgust the imagination by pictures of yellow-wood furniture
that a landlord oddly desired to seize and a pallid child with bandages
round its throat. I cast down my eyes and shivered at the horror. Yet
there was something about the physical quality of the woman, unlovely
though she was, which preserved the occasion from utter baseness. I felt
sure that had it not been for the tyrannous emptiness of that evil,
shiny pigskin purse that jerked about on her trembling knees the poor
driven creature would have chosen ways of candor and gentleness. It was,
strangely enough, only when I looked at Kitty and marked how her
brightly colored prettiness arched over this plain criminal as though
she were a splendid bird of prey and this her sluggish insect food that
I felt the moment degrading.
Kitty was, I felt, being a little too clever over it.
"How is he wounded?" she asked.
The caller traced a pattern on the carpet with her blunt toe.
"I don't know how to put it; he's not exactly wounded. A shell burst--"
"Concussion?" suggested Kitty.
She answered with an odd glibness and humility, as though tendering us a
term she had long brooded over without arriving at comprehension, and
hoping that our superior intelligences would make something of it:
"Shell-shock." Our faces did not illumine, so she dragged on lamely,
"Anyway, he's not well." Again she played with her purse. Her face was
visibly damp.
"Not well? Is he dangerously ill?"
"Oh, no." She was too kind to harrow us. "Not dangerously ill."
Kitty brutally permitted a silence to fall. Our caller could not bear
it, and broke it in a voice that nervousness had turned to a funny,
diffident croak.
"He's in the Queen Mary Hospital at Boulogne." We did not speak, and she
began to flush and wriggle on her seat, and stooped forward to fumble
under the legs of her chair for her umbrella. The sight of its green
seams and unveracious tortoiseshell handle disgusted Kitty into speech.
"How do you know all this?"
Our visitor met her eyes. This was evidently a moment for which she had
steeled herself, and she rose to it with a catch of her breath. "A man
who used to be a clerk along with my husband is in Mr. Baldry's
regiment." Her voice croaked even more piteously, and her eyes begged:
"Leave it at that! Leave it at that! If you only knew--"
"And what regiment is that?" pursued Kitty.
The poor sallow face shone with sweat.
"I never thought to ask," she said.
"Well, your friend's name--"
Mrs. Grey moved on her seat so suddenly and violently that the pigskin
purse fell from her lap and lay at my feet. I supposed that she cast it
from her purposely because its emptiness had brought her to this
humiliation, and that the scene would close presently in a few quiet
tears.
I hoped that Kitty would let her go without scarring her too much with
words and would not mind if I gave her a little money. There was no
doubt in my mind but that this queer, ugly episode in which this woman
butted like a clumsy animal at a gate she was not intelligent enough to
open would dissolve and be replaced by some more pleasing composition in
which we would take our proper parts; in which, that is, she would turn
from our rightness ashamed. Yet she cried:
"But Chris is ill!"
It took only a second for the compact insolence of the moment to
penetrate, the amazing impertinence of the use of his name, the
accusation of callousness she brought against us whose passion for Chris
was our point of honor, because we would not shriek at her false news,
the impudently bright, indignant gaze she flung at us, the lift of her
voice that pretended she could not understand our coolness and
irrelevance. I pushed the purse away from me with my toe, and hated her
as the rich hate the poor as insect things that will struggle out of the
crannies which are their decent home and introduce ugliness to the light
of day. And Kitty said in a voice shaken with pitilessness:
"You are impertinent. I know exactly what you are doing. You have read
in the 'Harrow Observer' or somewhere that my husband is at the front,
and you come to tell this story because you think that you will get some
money. I've read of such cases in the papers. You forget that if
anything had happened to my husband the War Office would have told me.
You should think yourself very lucky that I don't hand you over to the
police." She shrilled a little before she came to the end. "Please go!"
"Kitty!" I breathed. I was so ashamed that such a scene should spring
from Chris's peril at the front that I wanted to go out into the garden
and sit by the pond until the poor thing had removed her deplorable
umbrella, her unpardonable raincoat, her poor frustrated fraud. But Mrs.
Grey, who had begun childishly and deliberately, "It's _you_ who are
being--" and had desisted simply because she realized that there were no
harsh notes on her lyre, and that she could not strike these chords
that others found so easy, had fixed me with a certain wet, clear,
patient gaze. It is the gift of animals and those of peasant stock. From
the least regarded, from an old horse nosing over a gate, or a drab in a
work-house ward, it wrings the heart. From this woman--I said
checkingly:
"Kitty!" and reconciled her in an undertone. "There's some mistake. Got
the name wrong, perhaps. Please tell us all about it."
Mrs. Grey began a forward movement like a curtsy. She was groveling
after that purse. When she rose, her face was pink from stooping, and
her dignity swam uncertainly in a sea of half-shed tears. She said:
"I'm sorry I've upset you. But when you know a thing like that it isn't
in flesh and blood to keep it from his wife. I am a married woman
myself, and I know. I knew Mr. Baldry fifteen years ago." Her voice
freely confessed that she had taken a liberty. "Quite a friend of the
family he was." She had added that touch to soften the crude
surprisingness of her announcement. It hardly did. "We lost sight of
each other. It's fifteen years since we last met. I had never seen nor
heard of him nor thought to do again till I got this a week ago."
She undid the purse and took out a telegram. I knew suddenly that all
she said was true; for that was why her hands had clasped that purse.
"He isn't well! He isn't well!" she said pleadingly. "He's lost his
memory, and thinks--thinks he still knows me."
She passed the telegram to Kitty, who read it, and laid it on her knee.
"See," said Mrs. Grey, "it's addressed to Margaret Allington, my maiden
name, and I've been married these ten years. And it was sent to my old
home, Monkey Island, at Bray. Father kept the inn there. It's fifteen
years since we left it. I never should have got this telegram if me and
my husband hadn't been down there last September and told the folks who
keep it now who I was."
Kitty folded up the telegram and said in a little voice:
"This is a likely story."
Again Mrs. Grey's eyes brimmed. "People are rude to one," she visibly
said, but surely not nice people like this. She simply continued to sit.
Kitty cried out, as though arguing:
"There's nothing about shell-shock in this wire."
Our visitor melted into a trembling shyness.
"There was a letter, too."
Kitty held out her hand.
She gasped:
"Oh, no, I couldn't do that!"
"I must have it," said Kitty.
The caller's eyes grew great. She rose and dived clumsily for her
umbrella, which had again slipped under the chair.
"I can't," she cried, and scurried to the open door like a pelted dog.
She would have run down the steps at once had not some tender thought
arrested her. She turned to me trustfully and stammered, "He is at that
hospital I said," as if, since I had dealt her no direct blow, I might
be able to salve the news she brought from the general wreck of manners.
And then Kitty's stiff pallor struck to her heart, and cried
comfortingly across the distance, "I tell you, I haven't seen him for
fifteen years." She faced about, pushed down her hat on her head, and
ran down the steps to the gravel. "They won't understand!" we heard her
sob.
For a long time we watched her as she went along the drive, her
yellowish raincoat looking sick and bright in the sharp sunshine, her
black plumes nodding like the pines above, her cheap boots making her
walk on her heels, a spreading stain on the fabric of our life. When she
was quite hidden by the dark clump of rhododendrons at the corner, Kitty
turned and went to the fireplace. She laid her arms against the oak
mantel-piece and cooled her face against her arms.
When at last I followed her she said:
"Do you believe her?"
I started. I had forgotten that we had ever disbelieved her.
"Yes," I replied.
"What can it mean?" She dropped her arms and stared at me imploringly.
"Think, think, of something it can mean which isn't detestable!"
"It's all a mystery," I said; and added madly, because nobody had ever
been cross with Kitty, "You didn't help to clear it up."
"Oh, I know you think I was rude," she petulantly moaned; "but you're
so slow you don't see what it means. Either it means that he's mad, our
Chris, our splendid, sane Chris, all broken and queer, not knowing us--I
can't bear to think of that. It can't be true. But if he isn't--Jenny,
there was nothing in that telegram to show he'd lost his memory. It was
just affection--a name that might have been a pet name, things that it
was a little common to put in a telegram. It's queer he should have
written such a message, queer that he shouldn't have told me about
knowing her, queer that he ever should have known such a woman. It shows
there are bits of him we don't know. Things may be awfully wrong. It's
all such a breach of trust! I resent it."
I was appalled by these stiff, dignified gestures that seemed to be
plucking Chris's soul from his body, tormented though it was by this
unknown calamity.
"But Chris is ill!" I cried.
She stared at me.
"You're saying what she said."
Indeed, there seemed no better words than those Mrs. Grey had used. I
repeated:
"But he is ill!"
She laid her face against her arms again.
"What does that matter?" she wailed. "If he could send that telegram, he
is no longer ours."