The Return of the Soldier - Rebecca West (most popular ebook readers txt) 📗

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 armchair 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 staircase, 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 armchair 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