I felt, I remember with the little perk of self-approbation with which
one remembers any sort of accurate premonition even if its fulfilment
means disaster, a cold hand close round my heart as we turned the corner
of the house and came on Dr. Gilbert Anderson. I was startled, to begin
with, by his unmedical appearance. He was a little man with winking blue
eyes, a flushed and crumpled forehead, a little gray mustache that gave
him the profile of an amiable cat, and a lively taste in spotted ties,
and he lacked that appetiteless look which is affected by distinguished
practitioners. He was at once more comical and more suggestive of power
than any other doctor I had ever seen, and this difference was
emphasized by his unexpected occupation. A tennis-ball which he had
discovered somewhere had roused his sporting instincts, and he was
trying at what range it was possible to kick it between two large stones
which he had placed close together in front of the steps up to the
house. It was his chubby absorption in this amusement which accounted
for his first moment of embarrassment.
"Nobody about in there; we professional men get so little fresh air," he
said bluffly, and blew his nose in a very large handkerchief, from the
folds of which he emerged with perfect self-possession. "You," he said
to Chris, with a naïve adoption of the detective tone, "are the
patient." He rolled his blue eye on me, took a good look, and, as he
realized I did not matter, shook off the unnecessary impression like a
dog coming out of water. He faced Margaret as though she were the nurse
in charge of the case and gave her a brisk little nod. "You're Mrs.
Grey. I shall want to talk to you later. Meantime--this man. I'll come
back." He indicated by a windmill gesture that we should go into the
house, and swung off with Chris.
She obeyed; that sort of woman always does what the doctor orders. But I
delayed for a moment to stare after this singular specialist, to
sidetrack my foreboding by pronouncing him a bounder, to wish, as my
foreboding persisted, that like a servant I could give notice because
there was "always something happening in the house."
Then, as the obedient figure at the top of the stairs was plainly
shivering under its shoddy clothes in the rising wind that was polishing
the end of the afternoon to brightness, I hastened to lead her into the
hall. We stood about uneasily in its gloaming. Margaret looked round her
and said in a voice flattened by the despondency she evidently shared
with me: "It is nice to have everything ready that people can want and
everything in its place. I used to do it at Monkey Island Inn. It was
not grand like this, of course, but our visitors always came back a
second time." Abstractedly and yet with joy she fingered the fine work
of the table-leg.
There was a noise above us like the fluttering of doves. Kitty was
coming downstairs in a white serge dress against which her hands were
rosy; a woman with such lovely little hands never needed to wear
flowers. By her kind of physical discipline she had reduced her grief to
no more than a slight darkening under the eyes, and for this moment she
was glowing. I knew it was because she was going to meet a new man and
anticipated the kindling of admiration in his eyes, and I smiled,
contrasting her probable prefiguring of Dr. Anderson with the amiable
rotundity we had just encountered. Not that it would have made any
difference if she had seen him. Beautiful women of her type lose, in
this matter of admiration alone, their otherwise tremendous sense of
class distinction; they are obscurely aware that it is their civilizing
mission to flash the jewel of their beauty before all men, so that they
shall desire it and work to get the wealth to buy it, and thus be
seduced by a present appetite to a tilling of the earth that serves the
future. There is, you know, really room for all of us; we each have our
peculiar use.
"The doctor's talking to Chris outside," I said.
"Ah," breathed Kitty. I found, though the occasion was a little grim,
some entertainment in the two women's faces, so mutually intent, so
differently fair, the one a polished surface that reflected light, like
a mirror hung opposite a window, the other a lamp grimed by the smoke of
careless use, but still giving out radiance from its burning oil.
Margaret was smiling wonderingly up at this prettiness, but Kitty seemed
to be doing some brainwork.
"How do you do, Mrs. Grey?" she said, suddenly shaking out her
cordiality as one shakes out a fan. "It's very kind of you. Won't you go
up-stairs and take off your things?"
"No, thank you," answered Margaret, shyly, "I shall have to go away so
soon."
"Ah, do!" begged Kitty, prettily.
It was, of course, that she did not want Margaret to meet the specialist
in those awful clothes; but I did not darken the situation by explaining
that this disaster had already happened. Instead, I turned to Margaret
an expression which conveyed that this was an act of hospitality the
refusal of which we would find wounding, and to that she yielded, as I
knew she would. She followed me up-stairs and along the corridors very
slowly, like a child paddling in a summer sea. She enjoyed the feeling
of the thick carpet underfoot; she looked lingeringly at the pictures on
the wall; occasionally she put a finger to touch a vase as if by that
she made its preciousness more her own. Her spirit, I could see, was as
deeply concerned about Chris as was mine; but she had such faith in life
that she retained serenity enough to enjoy what beauty she came across
in her period of waiting. Even her enjoyment was indirectly generous.
When she came into my room the backward flinging of her head and her
deep "Oh!" recalled to me what I had long forgotten, how fine were its
proportions, how clever the grooved arch above the window, how like the
evening sky my blue curtains.
"And the lovely things you have on your dressing-table," she commented.
"You must have very good taste." The charity that changed my riches to a
merit! As I helped her to take off her raincoat and reflected that
Kitty would not be pleased when she saw that the removal of the garment
disclosed a purple blouse of stuff called moirette that servants use for
petticoats, she exclaimed softly Kitty's praises. "I know I shouldn't
make personal remarks, but Mrs. Baldry is lovely. She has three circles
round her neck. I've only two." It was a touching betrayal that she
possessed that intimate knowledge of her own person which comes to women
who have been loved. I could not for the life of me have told you how
many circles there were round my neck. Plainly discontented with herself
in the midst of all this fineness, she said diffidently, "Please, I
would like to do my hair." So I pulled the arm-chair up to the
dressing-table, and leaned on its back while she, sitting shyly on its
very edge, unpinned her two long braids, so thick, so dull.
"You've lovely hair," I said.
"I used to have nice hair," she mourned, "but these last few years I've
let myself go." She made half-hearted attempts to smooth the straggling
tendrils on her temples, but presently laid down her brush and clicked
her tongue against her teeth. "I hope that man's not worrying Chris,"
she said.
There was no reassurance ready, so I went to the other side of the room
to put her hat down on a chair, and stayed for a moment to pat its
plumes and wonder if nothing could be done with it. But it was, as
surgeons say, an inoperable case. So I just gloomed at it and wished I
had not let this doctor interpose his plumpness between Chris and
Margaret, who since that afternoon seemed to me as not only a woman whom
it was good to love, but, as a patron saint must appear to a Catholic,
as an intercessory being whose kindliness could be daunted only by some
special and incredibly malicious decision of the Supreme Force. I was
standing with eyes closed and my hands abstractedly stroking the hat
that was the emblem of her martyrdom, and I was thinking of her in a way
that was a prayer to her, when I heard her sharp cry. That she, whose
essence was a patient silence, should cry out sharply, startled me
strangely. I turned quickly.
She was standing up, and in her hand she held the photograph of Oliver
that I keep on my dressing-table. It is his last photograph, the one
taken just a week before he died.
"Who is this?" she asked.
"The only child Chris ever had. He died five years ago."
"Five years ago?"
Why did it matter so?
"Yes," I said.
"_He_ died five years ago, my Dick." Her eyes grew great. "How old was
he?"
"Just two."
"My Dick was two." We both were breathing hard. "Why did he die?"
"We never knew. He was the loveliest boy, but delicate from his birth.
At the end he just faded away, with the merest cold."
"So did my Dick--a chill. We thought he would be up and about the next
day, and he just--"
Her awful gesture of regret was suddenly paralyzed. She seemed to be
fighting her way to a discovery.
"It's--it's as if," she stammered, "they each had half a life."
I felt the usual instinct to treat her as though she were ill, because
it was evident that she was sustained by a mystic interpretation of
life. But she had already taught me something, so I stood aside while
she fell on her knees, and wondered why she did not look at the child's
photograph, but pressed it to her bosom, as though to stanch a wound. I
thought, as I have often thought before, that the childless have the
greatest joy in children, for to us they are just slips of immaturity
lovelier than the flowers and with the power over the heart, but to
mothers they are fleshly cables binding one down to such profundities of
feeling as the awful agony that now possessed her. For although I knew I
would have accepted it with rapture because it was the result of
intimacy with Chris, its awfulness appalled me. Not only did it make my
body hurt with sympathy; it shook the ground beneath my feet. For that
her serenity, which a moment before had seemed as steady as the earth
and as all-enveloping as the sky, should be so utterly dispelled made me
aware that I had of late been underestimating the cruelty of the order
of things. Lovers are frustrated; children are not begotten that should
have had the loveliest life; the pale usurpers of their birth die
young. Such a world will not suffer magic circles to endure.
The parlor-maid knocked at the door.
"Mrs. Baldry and Dr. Anderson are waiting in the drawing-room, ma'am."
Margaret reassumed her majesty, and put her white face close to the
glass as she pinned up her braids.
"I knew there was a something," she moaned, and set the hair-pins all
awry. More she could not say, though I clung to her and begged her; but
the slow gesture with which, as we were about to leave the room, she
laid her hand across the child's photograph somehow convinced me that we
were not to be victorious.
When we went into the drawing-room we found Dr. Anderson, plump and
expository, balancing himself on the balls of his feet on the hearth-rug
and enjoying the caress of the fire on his calves, while Kitty, showing
against the dark frame of her oak chair like a white rosebud that was
still too innocent to bloom, listened with that slight reservation of
the attention customary in beautiful women.
"A complete case of amnesia," he was saying as Margaret, white-lipped,
yet less shy than I had ever seen her, went to a seat by the window, and
I sank down on the sofa. "His unconscious self is refusing to let him
resume his relations with his normal life, and so we get this loss of
memory."
"I've always said," declared Kitty, with an air of good sense, "that if
he would make an effort--"
"Effort!" He jerked his round head about. "The mental life that can be
controlled by effort isn't the mental life that matters. You've been
stuffed up when you were young with talk about a thing called
self-control, a sort of barmaid of the soul that says, 'Time's up,
gentlemen,' and 'Here, you've had enough.' There's no such thing.
There's a deep self in one, the essential self, that has its wishes. And
if those wishes are suppressed by the superficial self,--the self that
makes, as you say, efforts, and usually makes them with the sole idea of
putting up a good show before the neighbors,--it takes its revenge. Into
the house of conduct erected by the superficial self it sends an
obsession, which doesn't, owing to a twist that the superficial self,
which isn't candid, gives it, seem to bear any relation to the
suppressed wish. A man who really wants to leave his wife develops a
hatred for pickled cabbage which may find vent in performances that lead
straight to the asylum. But that's all technical," he finished bluffly.
"My business to understand it, not yours. The point is, Mr. Baldry's
obsession is that he can't remember the latter years of his life.
Well,"--his winking blue eyes drew us all into a community we hardly
felt,--"what's the suppressed wish of which it's the manifestation?"
"He wished for nothing," said Kitty. "He was fond of us, and he had a
lot of money."
"Ah, but he did!" countered the doctor, gleefully. He seemed to be
enjoying it all. "Quite obviously he has forgotten his life here because
he is discontented with it. What clearer proof could you need than the
fact you were just telling me when these ladies came in--that the reason
the War Office didn't wire to you when he was wounded was that he had
forgotten to register his address? Don't you see what that means?"
"Forgetfulness," shrugged Kitty. "He isn't businesslike." She had always
nourished a doubt as to whether Chris was really, as she put it,
practical, and his income and his international reputation weighed
nothing as against his evident inability to pick up pieces at sales.
"One forgets only those things that one wants to forget. It's our
business to find out why he wanted to forget this life."
"He can remember quite well when he is hypnotized," she said
obstructively. She had quite ceased to glow.
"Oh, hypnotism's a silly trick. It releases the memory of a dissociated
personality which can't be related--not possibly in such an obstinate
case as this--to the waking personality. I'll do it by talking to him.
Getting him to tell his dreams." He beamed at the prospect. "But you--it
would be such a help if you would give me any clue to this discontent."
"I tell you," said Kitty, "he was not discontented till he went mad."
He caught the glint of her rising temper.
"Ah," he said, "madness is an indictment not of the people one lives
with, only of the high gods. If there was anything, it's evident that it
was not your fault." A smile sugared it, and knowing that where he had
to flatter his dissecting hand had not an easy task, he turned to me,
whose general appearance suggests that flattery is not part of my daily
diet. "You, Miss Baldry, you've known him longest."
"Nothing and everything was wrong," I said at last. "I've always felt
it." A sharp movement of Kitty's body confirmed my deep, old suspicion
that she hated me.
He went back further than I expected.
"His relations with his father and mother, now?"
"His father was old when he was born, and always was a little jealous of
him. His mother was not his sort. She wanted a stupid son who would have
been satisfied with shooting."
He laid down a remark very softly, like a hunter setting a snare.
"He turned, then, to sex with a peculiar need."
It was Margaret who spoke, shuffling her feet awkwardly under her
chair.
"Yes, he was always dependent."
We gaped at her who said this of our splendid Chris, and I saw that she
was not as she had been. There was a directness of speech, a straight
stare, that was for her a frenzy. "Doctor," she said, her mild voice
roughened, "what's the use of talking? You can't cure him,"--she caught
her lower lip with her teeth and fought back from the brink of
tears,--"make him happy, I mean. All you can do is to make him
ordinary."
"I grant you that's all I do," he said. It queerly seemed as though he
was experiencing the relief one feels on meeting an intellectual equal.
"It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of
the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it's the
place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don't see the urgency myself."
She continued without joy:
"I know how you could bring him back--a memory so strong that it would
recall everything else in spite of his discontent."
The little man had lost in a moment his glib assurance, his knowingness
about the pathways of the soul.
"Well, I'm willing to learn."
"Remind him of the boy," said Margaret.
The doctor ceased suddenly to balance on the balls of his feet.
"What boy?"
"They had a boy."
He looked at Kitty.
"You told me nothing of this!"
"I didn't think it mattered," she answered, and shivered and looked
cold, as she always did at the memory of her unique contact with death.
"He died five years ago."
He dropped his head back, stared at the cornice, and said with the soft
malignity of a clever person dealing with the slow-witted.
"These subtle discontents are often the most difficult to deal with."
Sharply he turned to Margaret. "How would you remind him?"
"Take him something the boy wore, some toy he played with."
Their eyes met wisely.
"It would have to be you that did it."
Her face assented.
Kitty said:
"I don't understand. How does it matter so much?" She repeated it twice
before she broke the silence that Margaret's wisdom had brought down on
us. Then Dr. Anderson, rattling the keys in his trousers-pockets and
swelling red and perturbed, answered:
"I don't know, but it does."
Kitty's voice soared in satisfaction.
"Oh, then it's very simple. Mrs. Grey can do it now. Jenny, take Mrs.
Grey up to the nursery. There are lots of things up there."
Margaret made no movement, but continued to sit with her heavy boots
resting on the edge of their soles. Dr. Anderson searched Kitty's face,
exclaimed, "Oh, well!" and flung himself into an arm-chair so suddenly
that the springs spoke. Margaret smiled at that and turned to me, "Yes,
take me to the nursery, please." Yet as I walked beside her up the
stairs I knew this compliance was not the indication of any melting of
this new steely sternness. The very breathing that I heard as I knelt
beside her at the nursery door and eased the disused lock seemed to come
from a different and a harsher body than had been hers before. I did not
wonder that she was feeling bleak, since in a few moments she was to go
out and say the words that would end all her happiness, that would
destroy all the gifts her generosity had so difficultly amassed. Well,
that is the kind of thing one has to do in this life.
But hardly had the door opened and disclosed the empty, sunny spaces
swimming with motes before her old sweetness flowered again. She moved
forward slowly, tremulous and responsive and pleased, as though the
room's loveliness was a gift to her. She stretched out her hands to the
clear sapphire walls and the bright fresco of birds and animals with a
young delight. So, I thought, might a bride go about the house her
husband secretly prepared for her. Yet when she reached the hearth and
stood with her hands behind her on the fireguard, looking about her at
all the exquisite devices of our nursery to rivet health and amusement
on our reluctant little visitor, it was so apparent that she was a
mother that I could not imagine how it was that I had not always known
it. It has sometimes happened that painters who have kept close enough
to earth to see a heavenly vision have made pictures of the assumption
of the Blessed Virgin which do indeed show women who could bring God
into the world by the passion of their motherhood. "Let there be life,"
their suspended bodies seem to cry out to the universe about them, and
the very clouds under their feet change into cherubim. As Margaret stood
there, her hands pressed palm to palm beneath her chin and a blind smile
on her face, she looked even so.
"Oh, the fine room!" she cried. "But where's his little cot?"
"It isn't here. This is the day nursery. The night nursery we didn't
keep. It is just bedroom now."
Her eyes shone at the thought of the cockered childhood this had been.
"I couldn't afford to have two nurseries. It makes all the difference to
the wee things." She hung above me for a little as I opened the ottoman
and rummaged among Oliver's clothes. "Ah, the lovely little frocks! Did
she make them? Ah, well, she'd hardly have the time, with this great
house to see to. But I don't care much for baby frocks. The babies
themselves are none the happier for them. It's all show." She went over
to the rocking-horse and gave a ghostly child a ride. For long she
hummed a tuneless song into the sunshine and retreated far away into
some maternal dream. "He was too young for this," she said. "His daddy
must have given him it. I knew it. Men always give them presents above
their age, they're in such a hurry for them to grow up. We like them to
take their time, the loves. But where's his engine? Didn't he love
puffer-trains? Of course he never saw them. You're so far from the
railway station. What a pity! He'd have loved them so. Dick was so happy
when I stopped his pram on the railway-bridge on my way back from the
shops, and he could sit up and see the puffers going by." Her distress
that Oliver had missed this humble pleasure darkened her for a minute.
"Why did he die! You didn't overtax his brain? He wasn't taught his
letters too soon?"
"Oh, no," I said. I couldn't find the clothes I wanted. "The only thing
that taxed his little brain was the prayers his Scotch nurse taught him,
and he didn't bother much over them. He would say, 'Jesus, tender
leopard,' instead of 'Jesus, tender shepherd,' as if he liked it
better."
"Did you ever! The things they say! He'd a Scotch nurse. They say
they're very good. I've read in the papers the Queen of Spain has one."
She had gone back to the hearth again, and was playing with the toys on
the mantelpiece. It was odd that she showed no interest in my search for
the most memorable garment. A vivacity which played above her tear-wet
strength, like a ball of St. Elmo's fire on the mast of a stout ship,
made me realize she still was strange. "The toys he had! His nurse
didn't let him have them all at once. She held him up and said, 'Baby,
you must choose!' and he said, 'Teddy, please, Nanny,' and wagged his
head at every word."
I had laid my hand on them at last. I wished, in the strangest way, that
I had not. Yet of course it had to be.
"That's just what he did do," I said.
As she felt the fine kid-skin of the clockwork dog, her face began to
twitch.
"I thought perhaps my baby had left me because I had so little to give
him. But if a baby could leave all this!" She cried flatly, as though
constant repetition in the night had made it as instinctive a reaction
to suffering as a moan, "I want a child! I want a child!" Her arms
invoked the wasted life that had been squandered in this room. "It's all
gone so wrong," she fretted, and her voice dropped to a solemn whisper.
"They each had only half a life."
I had to steady her. She could not go to Chris and shock him not only by
her news, but also by her agony. I rose and took her the things I had
found in the ottoman and the toy cupboard.
"I think these are the best things to take. This is one of the blue
jerseys he used to wear. This is the red ball he and his father used to
play with on the lawn."
Her hard hunger for the child that was not melted into a tenderness for
the child that had been. She looked broodingly at what I carried, then
laid a kind hand on my arm.
"You've chosen the very things he will remember. Oh, you poor girl!"
I found that from her I could accept even pity.
She nursed the jersey and the ball, changed them from arm to arm, and
held them to her face.
"I think I know the kind of boy he was--a man from the first." She
kissed them, folded up the jersey, and neatly set the ball upon it on
the ottoman, and regarded them with tears. "There, put them back. That's
all I wanted them for. All I came up here for."
I stared.
"To get Chris's boy," she moaned. "You thought I meant to take them out
to Chris?" She wrung her hands; her weak voice quavered at the sternness
of her resolution. "How can I?"
I grasped her hands.
"Why should you bring him back?" I said. I might have known there was
deliverance in her yet.
Her slow mind gathered speed.
"Either I never should have come," she pleaded, "or you should let him
be." She was arguing not with me, but with the whole hostile, reasonable
world. "Mind you, I wasn't sure if I ought to come the second time,
seeing we both were married and that. I prayed and read the Bible, but
I couldn't get any help. You don't notice how little there is in the
Bible really till you go to it for help. But I've lived a hard life and
I've always done my best for William, and I know nothing in the world
matters so much as happiness. If anybody's happy, you ought to let them
be. So I came again. Let him be. If you knew how happy he was just
pottering round the garden. Men do love a garden. He could just go on.
It can go on so easily." But there was a shade of doubt in her voice;
she was pleading not only with me, but with fate. "You wouldn't let them
take him away to the asylum. You wouldn't stop me coming. The other one
might, but you'd see she didn't. Oh, do just let him be!
"Put it like this." She made such explanatory gestures as I have seen
cabmen make over their saucers of tea round a shelter. "If my boy had
been a cripple,--he wasn't; he had the loveliest limbs,--and the
doctors had said to me, 'We'll straighten your boy's legs for you, but
he will be in pain all the rest of his life,' I'd not have let them
touch him.
"I seemed to have to tell them that I knew a way. I suppose it would
have been sly to sit there and not tell them. I told them, anyhow. But,
oh, I can't do it! Go out and put an end to the poor love's happiness.
After the time he's had, the war and all. And then he'll have to go back
there! I can't! I can't!"
[Illustration: "I oughtn't to do it, ought I?"]
I felt an ecstatic sense of ease. Everything was going to be right.
Chris was to live in the interminable enjoyment of his youth and love.
There was to be a finality about his happiness which usually belongs
only to loss and calamity; he was to be as happy as a ring cast into the
sea is lost, as a man whose coffin has lain for centuries beneath the
sod is dead. Yet Margaret continued to say, and irritated me by the
implication that the matter was not settled:
"I oughtn't to do it, ought I?"
"Of course not! Of course not!" I cried heartily, but the attention died
in her eyes. She stared over my shoulder at the open door, where Kitty
stood.
The poise of her head had lost its pride, the shadows under her eyes
were black like the marks of blows, and all her loveliness was diverted
to the expression of grief. She held in her arms her Chinese sleeve dog,
a once-prized pet that had fallen from favor and was now only to be met
whining upward for a little love at every passer in the corridors, and
it sprawled leaf-brown across her white frock, wriggling for joy at the
unaccustomed embrace. That she should at last have stooped to lift the
lonely little dog was a sign of her deep unhappiness. Why she had come
up I do not know, nor why her face puckered with tears as she looked in
on us. It was not that she had the slightest intimation of our decision,
for she could not have conceived that we could follow any course but
that which was obviously to her advantage. It was simply that she hated
to see this strange, ugly woman moving about among her things. She
swallowed her tears and passed on, to drift, like a dog, about the
corridors.
Now, why did Kitty, who was the falsest thing on earth, who was in tune
with every kind of falsity, by merely suffering somehow remind us of
reality? Why did her tears reveal to me what I had learned long ago, but
had forgotten in my frenzied love, that there is a draft that we must
drink or not be fully human? I knew that one must know the truth. I knew
quite well that when one is adult one must raise to one's lips the wine
of the truth, heedless that it is not sweet like milk, but draws the
mouth with its strength, and celebrate communion with reality, or else
walk forever queer and small like a dwarf. Thirst for this sacrament had
made Chris strike away the cup of lies about life that Kitty's white
hands held to him and turn to Margaret with this vast trustful gesture
of his loss of memory. And helped by me, she had forgotten that it is
the first concern of love to safeguard the dignity of the beloved, so
that neither God in his skies nor the boy peering through the hedge
should find in all time one possibility for contempt, and had handed him
the trivial toy of happiness. We had been utterly negligent of his
future, blasphemously careless of the divine essential of his soul. For
if we left him in his magic circle there would come a time when his
delusion turned to a senile idiocy; when his joy at the sight of
Margaret disgusted the flesh because his smiling mouth was slack with
age; when one's eyes no longer followed him caressingly as he went down
to look for the first primroses in the wood, but flitted here and there
defensively to see that nobody was noticing the doddering old man.
Gamekeepers would chat kindly with him, and tap their foreheads as they
passed through the copse; callers would be tactful and dangle bright
talk before him. He who was as a flag flying from our tower would become
a queer-shaped patch of eccentricity on the country-side, the
full-mannered music of his being would become a witless piping in the
bushes. He would not be quite a man.
I did not know how I could pierce Margaret's simplicity with this last
cruel subtlety, and turned to her, stammering. But she said:
"Give me the jersey and the ball."
The rebellion had gone from her eyes, and they were again the seat of
all gentle wisdom.
"The truth's the truth," she said, "and he must know it."
I looked up at her, gasping, yet not truly amazed; for I had always
known she could not leave her throne of righteousness for long, and she
repeated, "The truth's the truth," smiling sadly at the strange order of
this earth.
We kissed not as women, but as lovers do; I think we each embraced that
part of Chris the other had absorbed by her love. She took the jersey
and the ball, and clasped them as though they were a child. When she got
to the door she stopped and leaned against the lintel. Her head fell
back; her eyes closed; her mouth was contorted as though she swallowed
bitter drink.
I lay face downward on the ottoman and presently heard her poor boots go
creaking down the corridors. Through the feeling of doom that filled the
room as tangibly as a scent I stretched out to the thought of Chris. In
the deep daze of devotion which followed recollection of the fair down
on his cheek, the skin burned brown to the rim of his gray eyes, the
harsh and diffident masculinity of him, I found comfort in remembering
that there was a physical gallantry about him which would still, even
when the worst had happened, leap sometimes to the joy of life. Always,
to the very end, when the sun shone on his face or his horse took his
fences well, he would screw up his eyes and smile that little
stiff-lipped smile. I nursed a feeble glow at that. "We must ride a
lot," I planned. And then Kitty's heels tapped on the polished floor,
and her skirts swished as she sat down in the arm-chair, and I was
distressed by the sense, more tiresome than a flickering light, of some
one fretting.
She said:
"I wish she would hurry up. She's got to do it sooner or later."
My spirit was asleep in horror. Out there Margaret was breaking his
heart and hers, using words like a hammer, looking wise, doing it so
well.
"Aren't they coming back?" asked Kitty. "I wish you'd look."
There was nothing in the garden; only a column of birds swinging across
the lake of green light that lay before the sunset.
A long time after Kitty spoke once more:
"Jenny, do look again."
There had fallen a twilight which was a wistfulness of the earth. Under
the cedar-boughs I dimly saw a figure mothering something in her arms.
Almost had she dissolved into the shadows; in another moment the night
would have her. With his back turned on this fading unhappiness Chris
walked across the lawn. He was looking up under his brows at the
over-arching house as though it were a hated place to which, against all
his hopes, business had forced him to return. He stepped aside to avoid
a patch of brightness cast by a lighted window on the grass; lights in
our house were worse than darkness, affection worse than hate elsewhere.
He wore a dreadful, decent smile; I knew how his voice would resolutely
lift in greeting us. He walked not loose-limbed like a boy, as he had
done that very afternoon, but with the soldier's hard tread upon the
heel. It recalled to me that, bad as we were, we were yet not the worst
circumstance of his return. When we had lifted the yoke of our embraces
from his shoulders he would go back to that flooded trench in Flanders,
under that sky more full of flying death than clouds, to that
No-Man's-Land where bullets fall like rain on the rotting faces of the
dead.
"Jenny, aren't they there?" Kitty asked again.
"They're both there."
"Is he coming back?"
"He's coming back."
"Jenny! Jenny! How does he look?"
"Oh,"--how could I say it?--"every inch a soldier."
She crept behind me to the window, peered over my shoulder and saw.
I heard her suck in her breath with satisfaction.
"He's cured!" she whispered slowly. "He's cured!"
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's The Return of the Soldier, by Rebecca West