The Return of the Soldier - Rebecca West (most popular ebook readers txt) 📗
- Author: Rebecca West
- Performer: -
Book online «The Return of the Soldier - Rebecca West (most popular ebook readers txt) 📗». Author Rebecca West
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 mantelpiece 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 is 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 is 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.”
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
Comments (0)