I was sorry the next morning that the post comes too late at Harrowweald
to be brought up with the morning tea and waits for one at the breakfast
table; for under Kitty's fixed gaze I had to open a letter which bore
the Boulogne postmark and was addressed in the writing of Frank Baldry,
Chris's cousin, who is in the church. He wrote:
DEAR JENNY:
You will have to break it to Kitty and try to make her take it as
quietly as possible. This sentence will sound ominous as a start,
but I'm so full of the extraordinary thing that has happened to
Chris that I feel as if every living creature was in possession of
the facts. I don't know how much you know about it, so I'd better
begin at the beginning. Last Thursday I got a wire from Chris,
saying that he had had concussion, though not seriously, and was in
a hospital about a mile from Boulogne, where he would be glad to
see me. It struck me as odd that it had been sent to Ollenshaws,
where I was curate fifteen years ago. Fortunately, I have always
kept in touch with Sumpter, whom I regard as a specimen of the very
best type of country clergymen, and he forwarded it without
unnecessary delay. I started that evening, and looked hard for you
and Kitty on the boat; but came to the conclusion I should probably
find you at the hospital.
After having breakfasted in the town,--how superior French cooking
is! I would have looked in vain for such coffee, such an omelet, in
my own parish,--I went off to look for the hospital. It is a girls'
school, which has been taken over by the Red Cross, with fair-sized
grounds and plenty of nice dry paths under the _tilleuls_. I could
not see Chris for an hour, so I sat down on a bench by a funny,
little round pond, with a stone coping, very French. Some wounded
soldiers who came out to sit in the sun were rather rude because I
was not in khaki, even when I explained that I was a priest of God
and that the feeling of the bishops was strongly against the
enlistment of the clergy. I do feel that the church has lost its
grip on the masses.
Then a nurse came out and took me in to see Chris. He is in a nice
room, with a southern exposure, with three other officers, who
seemed very decent (not the "new army," I am glad to say). He was
better than I had expected, but did not look quite himself. For one
thing, he was oddly boisterous. He seemed glad to see me, and told
me he could remember nothing about his concussion, but that he
wanted to get back to Harrowweald. He talked a lot about the wood
and the upper pond and wanted to know if the daffies were out yet,
and when he would be allowed to travel, because he felt that he
would get well at once if only he could get home. And then he was
silent for a minute, as though he was holding something back. It
will perhaps help you to realize the difficulty of my position when
you understand that all this happened before I had been in the room
five minutes!
Without flickering an eyelid, quite easily and naturally, he gave
me the surprising information that he was in love with a girl
called Margaret Allington, who is the daughter of a man who keeps
the inn on Monkey Island, at Bray on the Thames. He uttered some
appreciations of this woman which I was too upset to note. I
gasped, "How long has this been going on?" He laughed at my
surprise, and said, "Ever since I went down to stay with Uncle
Ambrose at Dorney after I'd got my B.Sc." Fifteen years ago! I was
still staring at him, unable to believe this barefaced admission of
a deception carried on for years, when he went on to say that,
though he had wired to her and she had wired a message in return,
she hadn't said anything about coming over to see him. "Now," he
said quite coolly, "I know old Allington's had a bad season,--oh,
I'm quite well up in the innkeeping business these days,--and I
think it may quite possibly be a lack of funds that is keeping her
away. I've lost my check-book somewhere in the scrim, and so I
wonder if you'd send her some money. Or, better still, for she's a
shy country thing, you might fetch her."
I stared. "Chris," I said, "I know the war is making some of us
very lax, and I can only ascribe to that the shamelessness with
which you admit the existence of a long-standing intrigue; but when
it comes to asking me to go over to England and fetch the woman--"
He interrupted me with a sneer that we parsons are inveterately
eighteenth century and have our minds perpetually inflamed by
visions of squires' sons seducing country wenches, and declared
that he meant to marry this Margaret Allington. "Oh, indeed!" I
said. "And may I ask what Kitty says to this arrangement?" "Who the
devil is Kitty?" he asked blankly. "Kitty is your wife," I said
quietly, but firmly. He sat up and shouted: "I haven't got a wife!
Has some woman been turning up with a cock-and-bull story of being
my wife? Because it's the damnedest lie!"
I determined to settle the matter by sharp, common-sense handling.
"Chris," I said, "you have evidently lost your memory. You were
married to Kitty Ellis at St. George's, Hanover Square, on the
third, or it may have been the fourth"--you know my wretched memory
for dates--"of February, in 1906." He turned very pale and asked
what year this was. "1916," I told him. He fell back in a fainting
condition. The nurse came, and said I had done it all right this
time, so she at least seemed to have known that he required a rude
awakening, although the doctor, a very nice man, Winchester and
New, told me he had known nothing of Chris's delusions.
An hour later I was called back into the room. Chris was looking at
himself in a hand-mirror, which he threw on the floor as I entered.
"You are right," he said; "I'm not twenty-one, but thirty-six." He
said he felt lonely and afraid, and that I must bring Margaret
Allington to him at once or he would die. Suddenly he stopped
raving and asked, "Is father all right?" I prayed for guidance, and
answered, "Your father passed away twelve years ago." He said,
"Good God! can't you say he _died_," and he turned over and lay
with his back to me. I have never before seen a strong man weep,
and it is indeed a terrible sight. He moaned a lot, and began to
call for this Margaret. Then he turned over again and said, "Now
tell us all about this Kitty that I've married." I told him she was
a beautiful little woman, and mentioned that she had a charming and
cultivated soprano voice. He said very fractiously: "I don't like
little women, and I hate anybody, male or female, who sings. O God,
I don't like this Kitty. Take her away!" And then he began to rave
again about this woman. He said that he was consumed with desire
for her and that he would never rest until he once more held her in
his arms. I had no suspicion that Chris had this side to his
nature, and it was almost a relief when he fainted again.
I have not seen him since, and it is evening; but I have had a long
talk with the doctor, who says that he has satisfied himself that
Chris is suffering from a loss of memory extending over a period of
fifteen years. He says that though, of course, it will be an
occasion of great trial to us all, he thinks that, in view of
Chris's expressed longing for Harrowweald, he ought to be taken
home, and advises me to make all arrangements for bringing him back
some time next week. I hope I shall be upheld in this difficult
enterprise.
In the meantime I leave it to you to prepare Kitty for this
terrible shock. I could have wished it were a woman of a different
type who was to see my poor cousin through these dark days, but
convey to her my deepest sympathy. Indeed, I never realized the
horror of warfare until I saw my cousin, of whose probity I am as
firmly convinced as of my own wantonly repudiating his most sacred
obligations.
Yours ever,
FRANK.
Over my shoulder Kitty muttered:
"And he always pretended he liked my singing." Then she gripped my arm
and shrieked in a possessive fury: "Bring him home! Bring him home!"
So, a week later, they brought Chris home.
From breakfast-time that day the house was pervaded with a
day-before-the-funeral feeling. Although all duties arising from the
occasion had been performed, one could settle to nothing else. Chris was
expected at one, but then there came a telegram to say he was delayed
till the late afternoon. So Kitty, whose beauty was as changed in grief
from its ordinary seeming as a rose in moonlight is different from a
rose by day, took me down after lunch to the greenhouses and had a
snappishly competent conversation about the year's vegetables with Pipe,
the gardener. Then Kitty went into the drawing-room and filled the house
with the desolate merriment of an inattentively played pianola, while I
sat in the hall and wrote letters and noticed how sad dance-music has
sounded ever since the war began. After that she started a savage raid
of domestic efficiency, and made the housemaids cry because the brass
handles of the tall-boys were not bright enough and because there was
only ten-to-one instead of a hundred-to-one risk of breaking a leg on
the parquet. Then she had tea, and hated the soda-cake. She was a
little, shrunk thing, huddled in the arm-chair farthest from the light,
when at last the big car came nosing up the drive through the dark.
We stood up. Through the thudding of the engines came the sound of
Chris's great male voice which always had in it a note like the baying
of a big dog. "Thanks, I can manage by myself." I heard, amazed, his
step ring strong upon the stone, for I had felt his absence as a kind of
death from which he would emerge ghostlike, impalpable. And then he
stood in the doorway, the gloom blurring his outlines like fur, the
faint, clear candle-light catching the fair down on his face. He did
not see me, in my dark dress, or huddled Kitty, and with the sleepy
smile of one who returns to a dear, familiar place to rest he walked
into the hall and laid down his stick and his khaki cap beside the
candlestick on the oak table. With both hands he felt the old wood, and
stood humming happily through his teeth.
I cried out, because I had seen that his hair was of three colors now,
brown and gold and silver.
With a quick turn of the head, he found me out in the shadows.
"Hullo, Jenny!" he said, and gripped my hands.
"O Chris, I am so glad!" I stuttered, and then could say no more for
shame that I was thirty-five instead of twenty. For his eyes had
hardened in the midst of his welcome, as though he had trusted that I at
least would have been no party to this conspiracy to deny that he was
young, and he said:
"I've dropped Frank in town. My temper's of the convalescent type." He
might as well have said, "I've dropped Frank, who had grown old, like
you."
"Chris," I went on, "it's so wonderful to have you safe."
"Safe," he repeated. He sighed very deeply and continued to hold my
hands. There was a rustle in the shadows, and he dropped my hands.
The face that looked out of the dimness to him was very white, and her
upper lip was lifted over her teeth in a distressed grimace. It was
immediately as plain as though he had shouted it that this sad mask
meant nothing to him. He knew not because memory had given him any
insight into her heart, but because there is an instinctive kindliness
in him which makes him wise about all suffering, that it would hurt her
if he asked if this was his wife; but his body involuntarily began a
gesture of inquiry before he realized that that, too, would hurt her,
and he checked it half-way. So, through a silence, he stood before her
slightly bent, as though he had been maimed.
"I am your wife." There was a weak, wailing anger behind the words.
"Kitty," he said softly and kindly. He looked around for some
graciousness to make the scene less wounding, and stooped to kiss her;
but he could not. The thought of another woman made him unable to
breathe, sent the blood running under his skin.
With a toss, like a child saying, "Well, if you don't want to, I'm sure
I wouldn't for the world!" Kitty withdrew from the suspended caress. He
watched her retreat into the shadows as though she were a symbol of this
new life by which he was baffled and oppressed, until the darkness
outside became filled with the sound like the surf which we always hear
at Harrowweald on angry evenings, and his eyes became distant, and his
lips smiled. "Up here--in this old place--how one hears the pines!"
She cried out from the other end of the room, as though she were
speaking with some one behind a shut door:
"I've ordered dinner at seven. I thought you'd probably have missed a
meal or two, or would want to go to bed early." She said it very
smartly, with her head on one side like a bird, as if she was pleading
that he would find her very clever about ordering dinner and thinking of
his comfort.
"Good," he said. "I'd better dress now, hadn't I?" He looked up the
stair-case, and would have gone up had I not held him back; for the
little room in the south wing, with the fishing-rods and the old books,
went in the rebuilding, absorbed by the black-and-white magnificence
that is Kitty's bedroom.
"Oh, I'll take you up," Kitty rang out efficiently. She pulled at his
coat-sleeve, so they started level on the lowest step. But as they went
up, the sense of his separateness beat her back; she lifted her arms as
though she struggled through a fog, and fell behind. When he reached the
top she was standing half-way down the stairs, her hands clasped under
her chin. But he did not see her. He was looking along the corridor and
saying, "This house is different." If the soul has to stay in its coffin
till the lead is struck asunder, in its captivity it speaks with such a
voice.
She braced herself with a gallant laugh.
"How you've forgotten!" she cried, and ran up to him, rattling her keys
and looking grave with housewifery, and I was left alone with the dusk
and the familiar things. The dusk flowed in wet and cool from the
garden, as if to put out the fire of confusion lighted on our
hearthstone, and the furniture, very visible through that soft evening
opacity with the observant brightness of old, well-polished wood, seemed
terribly aware. Strangeness had come into the house, and everything was
appalled by it, even time. For the moments dragged. It seemed to me,
half an hour later, that I had been standing for an infinite period in
the drawing-room, remembering that in the old days the blinds had never
been drawn in this room because old Mrs. Baldry had liked to see the
night gathering like a pool in the valley while the day lingered as a
white streak above the farthest hills, and perceiving in pain that the
heavy blue blinds that shroud the nine windows because a lost Zeppelin
sometimes clanks like a skeleton across the sky above us would make his
home seem even more like prison.
I began to say what was in my mind to Kitty when she came in, but she
moved past me, remote in preoccupation, and I was silent when I saw
that she was dressed in all respects like a bride. The gown she wore on
her wedding-day ten years ago had been cut and embroidered as this white
satin was; her hair had been coiled low on her neck, as it was now.
Around her throat were her pearls, and her longer chain of diamonds
dropped, looking cruelly bright, to her white, small breasts; because
she held some needlework to her bosom, I saw that her right hand was
stiff with rings and her left hand bare save for her wedding-ring. She
dropped her load of flannel on a work-table and sat down, spreading out
her skirts, in an arm-chair by the fire. With her lower lip thrust out,
as if she were considering a menu, she lowered her head and looked down
on herself. She frowned to see that the high lights on the satin shone
scarlet from the fire, that her flesh glowed like a rose, and she
changed her seat for a high-backed chair beneath the farthest
candle-sconce. There were green curtains close by, and now the lights on
her satin gown were green like cleft ice. She looked as cold as
moonlight, as virginity, but precious; the falling candle-light struck
her hair to bright, pure gold. So she waited for him.
There came suddenly a thud at the door. We heard Chris swear and stumble
to his feet, while one of the servants spoke helpfully. Kitty knitted
her brows, for she hates gracelessness, and a failure of physical
adjustment is the worst indignity she can conceive.
"He's fallen down those three steps from the hall," I whispered.
"They're new." She did not listen, because she was controlling her face
into harmony with the appearance of serene virginity upon which his eyes
would fall when he entered the room.
His fall had ruffled him and made him look very large and red, and he
breathed hard, like an animal pursued into a strange place by night,
and to his hot consciousness of his disorder the sight of Kitty, her
face and hands and bosom shining like the snow, her gown enfolding her,
and her gold hair crowning her with radiance, and the white fire of
jewels giving passion to the spectacle, was a deep refreshment. She sat
still for a time, so that he might feel this well, then raised her
ringed hand to her necklaces.
"It seems so strange that you should not remember me," she said. "You
gave me all these."
He answered kindly:
"I am glad I did that. You look very beautiful in them." But as he spoke
his gaze shifted to the shadows in the corners of the room, and the
blood ran hot under his skin. He was thinking of another woman, of
another beauty.
Kitty put up her hands as if to defend her jewels.
In that silence dinner was announced, and we went into the dining-room.
It is the fashion at Baldry Court to use no electric light save when
there is work to be done or a great company to be entertained, and to
eat and talk by the mild clarity of many candles. That night it was a
kindly fashion, for we sat about the table with our faces veiled in
shadow, and seemed to listen in quiet contentment to the talk of our man
who had come back to us. Yet all through the meal I was near to weeping,
because whenever he thought himself unobserved he looked at the things
that were familiar to him. Dipping his head, he would glance sidewise at
the old oak paneling, and nearer things he fingered as though sight were
not intimate enough a contact. His hand caressed the arm of his chair,
because he remembered the black gleam of it, stole out and touched the
recollected salt-cellar. It was his furtiveness that was heartrending;
it was as though he were an outcast, and we who loved him stout
policemen. Was Baldry Court so sleek a place that the unhappy felt
offenders there? Then we had all been living wickedly, and he, too. As
his fingers glided here and there he talked bravely about non-committal
things: to what ponies we had been strapped when at the age of five we
were introduced to the hunting-field; how we had teased to be allowed to
keep swans in the pond above the wood, and how the yellow bills of our
intended pets had sent us shrieking homeward; and all the dear life that
makes the bland English country-side secretly adventurous. "Funny
thing," he said. "All the time I was at Boulogne I wanted to see a
kingfisher, that blue scudding down a stream, or a heron's flight round
a willow--" He checked himself suddenly; his head fell forward on his
chest. "You have no herons here, of course," he said drearily, and
fingered the arm of his chair again. Then he raised his head again,
brisk with another subject. "Do they still have trouble with foxes at
Steppy End?"
Kitty shook her head.
"I don't know."
"Griffiths will know," Chris said cheerily, and swung round on his seat
to ask the butler, and found him osseous, where Griffiths was rotund;
dark, where Griffiths had been merrily mottled; strange, where Griffiths
had been a part of home, a condition of life. He sat back in his chair
as though his heart had stopped.
When the butler who is not Griffiths had left the room he spoke gruffly.
"Stupid of me, I know; but where is Griffiths?"
"Dead seven years ago," said Kitty, her eyes on her plate.
He sighed deeply in a shuddering horror.
"I'm sorry. He was a good man."
I cleared my throat.
"There are new people here, Chris, but they love you as the old ones
did."
He forced himself to smile at us both, to a gay response.
"As if I didn't know that to-night!"
But he did not know it. Even to me he would give no trust, because it
was Jenny the girl who had been his friend and not Jenny the woman. All
the inhabitants at this new tract of time were his enemies, all its
circumstances his prison-bars. There was suspicion in the gesture with
which, when we were back in the drawing-room he picked up the flannel
from the work-table.
"Whose is this?" he said curiously. His mother had been a hard-riding
woman, not apt with her needle.
"Clothes for one of the cottages," answered Kitty, breathlessly.
"We--we've a lot of responsibilities, you and I. With all of the land
you've bought, there are ever so many people to look after."
He moved his shoulders uneasily, as if under a yoke, and, after he had
drunk his coffee, pulled up one of the blinds and went out to pace the
flagged walk under the windows. Kitty huddled carelessly by the fire,
her hands over her face, unheeding by its red glow she looked not so
virginal and bride-like; so I think she was too distracted even to plan.
I went to the piano. Through this evening of sentences cut short because
their completed meaning was always sorrow, of normal life dissolved to
tears, the chords of Beethoven sounded serenely.
"So you like Jenny," said Kitty, suddenly, "to play Beethoven when it's
the war that's caused all this. I could have told that you would have
chosen to play German music this night of all nights."
So I began a saraband by Purcell, a jolly thing that makes one see a
plump, sound woman dancing on a sanded floor in some old inn, with
casks of good ale all about her and a world of sunshine and May lanes
without. As I played I wondered if things like this happened when
Purcell wrote such music, empty of everything except laughter and simple
greeds and satisfactions and at worst the wail of unrequited love. Why
had modern life brought forth these horrors, which made the old
tragedies seem no more than nursery-shows? And the sky also is
different. Behind Chris's head, as he halted at the open window, a
search-light turned all ways in the night, like a sword brandished among
the stars.
"Kitty."
"Yes, Chris." She was sweet and obedient and alert.
"I know my conduct must seem to you perversely insulting,"--behind him
the search-light wheeled while he gripped the sides of the window,--"but
if I do not see Margaret Allington I shall die."
She raised her hands to her jewels, and pressed the cool globes of her
pearls into her flesh. "She lives near here," she said easily. "I will
send the car down for her to-morrow. You shall see as much of her as you
like."
His arms fell to his sides.
"Thank you," he muttered; "you're all being so kind--" He disengaged
himself into the darkness.
I was amazed at Kitty's beautiful act and more amazed to find that it
had made her face ugly. Her eyes snapped as they met mine.
"That dowd!" she said, keeping her voice low, so that he might not hear
it as he passed to and fro before the window. "That dowd!"
This sudden abandonment of beauty and amiability meant so much in our
Kitty, whose law of life is grace, that I went over and kissed her.
"Dear, you're taking things all the wrong way," I said. "Chris is ill--"
"He's well enough to remember her all right," she replied unanswerably.
Her silver shoe tapped the floor; she pinched her lips for some moments.
"After all, I suppose I can sit down to it. Other women do. Teddy Rex
keeps a Gaiety girl, and Mrs. Rex has to grin and bear it." She shrugged
in answer to my silence. "What else is it, do you think? It means that
Chris is a man like other men. But I did think that bad women were
pretty. I suppose he's had so much to do with pretty ones that a plain
one's a change."
"Kitty! Kitty! how can you!"
But her little pink mouth went on manufacturing malice.
"This is all a blind," she said at the end of an unpardonable sentence.
"He's pretending."
I, who had felt his agony all the evening like a wound in my own body,
was past speech then, and I did not care what I did to stop her. I
gripped her small shoulders with my large hands, and shook her till her
jewels rattled and she scratched my fingers and gasped for breath. But I
did not mind so long as she was silent.
Chris spoke from the darkness.
"Jenny!" I let her go. He came in and stood over us, running his hand
through his hair unhappily. "Let's all be decent to each other," he said
heavily. "It's all such a muddle, and it's so rotten for all of us--"
Kitty shook herself neat and stood up.
"Why don't you say, 'Jenny, you mustn't be rude to visitors'? It's how
you feel, I know." She gathered up her needlework. "I'm going to bed.
It's been a horrid night."
She spoke so pathetically, like a child who hasn't enjoyed a party as
much as it had thought it would, that both of us felt a stir of
tenderness toward her as she left the room. We smiled sadly at each
other as we sat down by the fire, and I perceived that, perhaps because
I was flushed and looked younger, he felt more intimate with me than he
had yet done since his return. Indeed, in the warm, friendly silence
that followed he was like a patient when tiring visitors have gone and
he is left alone with his trusted nurse; smiled under drooped lids and
then paid me the high compliment of disregard. His limbs relaxed, he
sank back into his chair. I watched him vigilantly, and was ready at
that moment when thought intruded into his drowsings and his face began
to twitch. I asked:
"You can't remember her at all?"
"Oh, yes," he said, without raising his eyelids, "in a sense. I know how
she bows when you meet her in the street, how she dresses when she goes
to church. I know her as one knows a woman staying in the same hotel,
just like that."
"It's a pity you can't remember Kitty. All that a wife should be she's
been to you."
He sat forward, warming his palms at the blaze and hunching his
shoulders as though there were a draft. His silence compelled me to look
at him, and I found his eyes, cold and incredulous and frightened, on
me.
"Jenny, is this true?"
"That Kitty's been a good wife?"
"That Kitty is my wife, that I am old, that"--he waved a hand at the
altered room--"all this."
"It is all true. She is your wife, and this place is changed, and it's
better and jollier in all sorts of ways, believe me, and fifteen years
have passed. Why, Chris, can't you see that I have grown old?" My vanity
could hardly endure his slow stare, but I kept my fingers clasped on my
lap. "You see?"
He turned away with an assenting mutter; but I saw that deep down in
him, not to be moved by any material proof, his spirit was incredulous.
"Tell me what seems real to you," I begged. "Chris, be a pal. I'll never
tell."
"M-m-m," he said. His elbows were on his knees, and his hands stroked
his thick tarnished hair. I could not see his face, but I knew that his
skin was red and that his gray eyes were wet and bright. Then suddenly
he lifted his chin and laughed, like a happy swimmer breaking through a
wave that has swept him far inshore. He glowed with a radiance that
illuminated the moment till my blood tingled and I began to rub my hands
together and laugh, too. "Why, Monkey Island's real. But you don't know
old Monkey. Let me tell you."