The Return of the Soldier Page 3

  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-andbull 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 tento-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 t
o 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, wellpolished 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 weddingday 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 worktable 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 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 figured as though sight were not intimate enough a cont
act. 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 countryside 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.