The Return of the Soldier Read online

  “I know all about that,” I said quickly. I was more afraid that I should feel envy or any base passion in the presence of this woman than I have ever been of anything else in my life. “I want to hear how you came to part.”

  “Oh,” she cried, “it was the silliest quarrel! We had known how we felt for just a week. Such a week! Lovely weather we had, and father hadn’t noticed anything. I didn’t want him to, because I thought father might want the marriage soon and think any delay a slight on me, and I knew we would have to wait. Eh! I can remember saying to myself, ‘Perhaps five years,’ trying to make it as bad as could be so that if we could marry sooner it would be a lovely surprise.” She repeated with soft irony, “Perhaps five years!”

  “Well, then, one Thursday afternoon I ‘d gone on the back-water with Bert Batchard, nephew to Mr. Batchard who keeps the inn at Surly Hall. I was laughing out loud because he did row so funny! He’s a town chap, and he was handling those oars for all the world as though they were teaspoons. The old dinghy just sat on the water like a hen on its chicks and didn’t move, and he so sure of himself! I just sat and laughed and laughed. Then all of a sudden, clang! clang! the bell at the ferry. And there was Chris, standing up there among the poplars, his brows straight and black, and not a smile on him. I felt very bad. We picked him up in the dinghy and took him across, and still he didn’t smile. He and I got on the island, and Bert, who saw there was something wrong, said, “Well, I’ll toddle off.” And there I was on the lawn with Chris, and he angry and somehow miles away. I remember him saying, ‘Here am I coming to say good-by, because I must go away to-night, and I find you larking with that bounder.’ And I said: ‘O Chris, I’ve known Bert all my life through him coming to his uncle for the holidays, and we weren’t larking. It was only that he couldn’t row.’ And he went on talking, and then it struck me he wasn’t trusting me as he would trust a girl of his own class, and I told him so, and he went on being cruel. Oh, don’t make me remember the things we said to each other! It doesn’t help. At last I said something awful, and he said: ‘Very well; I agree. I’ll go,’ and he walked over to the boy, who was chopping wood, and got him to take him over in the punt. As he passed me he turned away his face. Well, that’s all.”

  I had got the key at last. There had been a spring at Baldry Court fifteen years ago that was desolate for all that there was beautiful weather. Chris had lingered with Uncle Ambrose in his Thames-side rectory as he had never lingered before, and old Mr. Baldry was filling the house with a sense of hot, apoplectic misery. All day he was up in town at the office, and without explanation he had discontinued his noontide habit of ringing up his wife. All night he used to sit in the library looking over his papers and ledgers; often in the mornings the housemaids would find him asleep across his desk, very red, yet looking dead. The men he brought home to dinner treated him with a kindness and consideration which were not the tributes that that victorious and trumpeting personality was accustomed to exact, and in the course of conversation with them he dropped braggart hints of impending ruin which he would have found it humiliating to address to us directly. At last there came a morning when he said to Mrs. Baldry across the breakfast-table: “I’ve sent for Chris. If the boy’s worth his salt—” It was an appalling admission, like the groan of an old ship as her timbers shiver, from a man who doubted the capacity of his son, as fathers always doubt the capacity of the children born of their old age.

  It was that evening, as I went down to see the new baby at the lodge, that I met Chris coming up the drive. Through the blue twilight his white face had had a drowned look. I remembered it well, because my surprise that he passed me without seeing me had made me perceive for the first time that he had never seen me at all save in the most cursory fashion. On the eye of his mind, I realized thenceforward, I had hardly impinged. That night he talked till late with his father, and in the morning he had started for Mexico to keep the mines going, to keep the firm’s head above water and Baldry Court sleek and hospitable—to keep everything bright and splendid save only his youth, which ever after that was dulled by care.

  Something of this I told Margaret, to which she answered, “Oh, I know all that,” and went on with her story. On Sunday, three days after their quarrel, Mr. Allington was found dead in his bed. “I wanted Chris so badly; but he never came, he never wrote,” and she fell into a lethargic disposition to sit all day and watch the Thames flow by, from which she was hardly roused by finding that her father had left her nothing save an income of twenty pounds a year from unrealizable stock. She negotiated the transfer of the lease of the inn to a publican, and, after exacting a promise from the new hostess that she would forward all letters that might come, embarked upon an increasingly unfortunate career as a mother’s help. First she fell into the hands of a noble Irish family in reduced circumstances, whose conduct in running away and leaving her in a Brighton hotel with her wages and her bill unpaid still distressed and perplexed her. “Why did they do it?” she asked. “I liked them so. The baby was a darling, and Mrs. Murphy had such a nice way of speaking. But it almost makes one think evil of people when they do a thing like that.” After two years of less sensational, but still uneasy, adventures, she had come upon a large and needy family called Watson who lived at Chiswick, and almost immediately Mr. William Grey, who was Mrs. Watson’s brother, had begun a court- ship that I suspected of consisting of an incessant whining up at her protective instinct. “Mr. Grey,” she said softly, as though stating his chief aim to affection, “has never been very successful.” And still no letter ever came.

  So, five years after she left Monkey Island, she married Mr. William Grey. Soon after their marriage he lost his job and was for some time out of work; later he developed a weak chest that needed constant attention. “But it all helped to pass the time,” she said cheerfully and without irony. So it happened that it was not till two years after that she had the chance of revisiting Monkey Island. At first there was no money, and later there was the necessity of seeking the healthful breezes of Brighton or Bognor or Southend, which were the places in which Mr. Grey’s chest oddly elected to thrive. And when these obstacles were removed, she was lethargic; also she had heard that the inn was not being managed as it ought to be, and she could not have borne to see the green home of her youth defiled. But then there had come a time when she had been very much upset,—she glared a little wildly at me as she said this, as if she would faint if I asked her any questions,—and then she had suddenly become obsessed with a desire to see Monkey Island once more.

  “Well, when we got to the ferry, Mr. Grey says, ‘But mercy, Margaret, there’s water all round it!’ and I said, ‘William, that’s just it.’” They found that the island was clean and decorous again, for it had only recently changed hands. “Father and daughter the new people are, just like me and dad, and Mr. Taylor’s something of dad’s cut, too, but he comes from the North. But Miss Taylor’s much handsomer than I ever was; a really big woman she is, and such lovely golden hair. They were very kind when I told them who I was; gave us duck and green peas for lunch and I did think of dad. They were nothing like as good as his ducks, but then I expect they paid. And then Miss Taylor took William out to look at the garden. I knew he didn’t like it, for he’s always shy with a showy woman, and I was going after them when Mr. Taylor said: ‘Here, stop a minute. I’ve got something here that may interest you. Just come in here.’ He took me up to the roller desk in the office, and out of the drawer he took twelve letters addressed to me in Chris’s handwriting.

  “He was a kind man. He put me into a chair and called Miss Taylor in and told her to keep William out in the garden as long as possible. At last I said, ‘But Mrs. Hitchcock did say she ‘d send my letters on.’ And he said, ‘Mrs. Hitchcock hadn’t been here three weeks before she bolted with a bookie from Bray, and after that Hitchcock mixed his drinks and got careless.’ He said they had found these stuffed into the desk.”

  “And what was in them?”

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p; “For a long time I did not read them; I thought it was against my duty as a wife. But when I got that telegram saying he was wounded, I went up-stairs and read those letters. Oh, those letters!” She bowed her head and wept.

  As the car swung through the gates of Baldry Court she sat up and dried her eyes. She looked out at the strip of turf, so bright that one would think it wet, and lighted here and there with snowdrops and scillas and crocuses, that runs between the drive and the tangle of silver birch and bramble and fern. There is no esthetic reason for that border; the common outside looks lovelier where it fringes the road with dark gorse and rough amber grasses. Its use is purely philosophic; it proclaims that here we esteem only controlled beauty, that the wild will not have its way within our gates, that it must be made delicate and decorated into felicity. Surely, she must see that this was no place for beauty that had been not mellowed, but lacerated, by time, that no one accustomed to live here could help wincing at such external dinginess as hers. But instead she said: “It’s a big place. Chris must have worked hard to keep all this up.” The pity of this woman was like a flaming sword. No one had ever before pitied Chris for the magnificence of Baldry Court. It had been our pretense that by wearing costly clothes and organizing a costly life we had been the servants of his desire. But she revealed the truth that, although he did indeed desire a magnificent house, it was a house not built with hands.

  But that she was wise, that the angels would of a certainty be on her side, did not make her any the less physically offensive to our atmosphere. All my doubts as to the wisdom of my expedition revived in the little time we had to spend in the hall waiting for the tea which I had ordered in the hope that it might help Margaret to compose her distressed face. She hovered with her back to the oak table, fumbling with her thread gloves, winking her tear-red eyes, tapping with her foot on the carpet, throwing her weight from one leg to the other, and I constantly contrasted her appearance by some clumsiness with the new acquisition of Kitty’s decorative genius that stood so close behind her on the table that I was afraid it might be upset by one of her spasmodic movements. This was a shallow black bowl in the center of which crouched on all fours a white, naked nymph, her small head intently drooped to the white flowers that floated on the black waters all around her. Beside the pure black of the bowl her rusty plumes looked horrible; beside that white nymph, eternally innocent of all but the contemplation of beauty, her opaque skin and her suffering were offensive; beside its air of being the coolly conceived and leisurely executed production of a hand and brain lifted by their rare quality to the service of the not absolutely necessary, her appearance of having only for the moment ceased to cope with a vexed and needy environment struck me as a cancerous blot on the fair world. Perhaps it was absurd to pay attention to this indictment of a noble woman by a potter’s toy, but that toy happened to be also a little image of Chris’s conception of women. Exquisite we were according to our equipment, unflushed by appetite or passion, even noble passion, our small heads bent intently on the white flowers of luxury floating on the black waters of life, he had known none other than us. With such a mental habit a man could not help but wince at Margaret. I drank my tea very slowly because I previsioned what must happen in the next five minutes. Down there by the pond he would turn at the sound of those heavy boots on the path, and with one glance he would assess the age of her, the rubbed surface of her, the torn fine texture, and he would show to her squalid mask just such a blank face as he had shown to Kitty’s piteous mask the night before. Although I had a gift for self-pity, I knew her case would then be worse than mine; for it would be worse to see, as she would see, the ardor in his eyes give place to kindliness than never to have ardor there. He would hesitate; she would make one of her harassed gestures, and trail away with that wet, patient look which was her special line. He would go back to his boyish sport with the skiff; I hoped the brown waters would not seem too kind. She would go back to Mariposa, sit on her bed, and read those letters.

  “And now,” she said brightly as I put down my cup, “may I see Chris?” She had not a doubt of the enterprise. I took her into the drawing-room and opened one of the French windows.

  “Go past the cedars to the pond,” I told her. “He is rowing there.”

  “That is nice,” she said. “He always looks so lovely in a boat.”

  I called after her, trying to hint the possibility of a panic breakdown to their meeting: “You’ll find he’s altered—”

  She cried gleefully: “Oh, I shall know him.”

  As I went up-stairs I became aware that I was near to a bodily collapse; I suppose the truth is that I was physically so jealous of Margaret that it was making me ill. But suddenly, like a tired person dropping a weight that they know to be precious, but cannot carry for another minute, my mind refused to consider the situation any longer and turned to the perception of material things. I leaned over the balustrade and looked down at the fineness of the hall: the deliberate figure of the nymph in her circle of black waters, the clear pink-and-white of Kitty’s chintz, the limpid surface of the oak, the broken burning of all the gay reflected colors in the paneled walls. I said to myself, “If everything else goes, there is always this to fall back on,” and I went on, pleased that I was wearing delicate stuffs and that I had a smooth skin, pleased that the walls of the corridor were so soft a twilight blue, pleased that through a far-off open door there came a stream of light that made the carpet blaze its stronger blue. And when I saw that it was the nursery door that was open, and that Kitty was sitting in Nanny’s big chair by the window, I did not care about the peaked face she lifted, its fairness palely gilt by the March sunlight, or the tremendous implications of the fact that she had come to her dead child’s nursery although she had not washed her hair. I said sternly, because she had forgotten that we lived in the impregnable fort of a gracious life:

  “O Kitty, that poor battered thing outside!”

  She stared so grimly out into the garden that my eyes followed her stare.

  It was one of those draggled days, common at the end of March when a garden looks at its worst. The wind that was rolling up to check a show of sunshine had taken away the cedar’s dignity of solid blue shade, had set the black firs beating their arms together, and had filled the sky with glaring gray clouds that dimmed the brilliance of the crocuses. It was to give gardens a point on days such as these, when the planned climax of this flower-bed and that stately tree goes for nothing, that the old gardeners raised statues in their lawns and walks, large things with a subject, mossy Tritons or nymphs with an urn, that held the eye. Even so in this unrestful garden one’s eyes lay on the figure in the yellow raincoat that was standing still in the middle of the lawn.

  How her near presence had been known by Chris I do not understand, but there he was, running across the lawn as night after night I had seen him in my dreams running across No-Man’s-Land. I knew that so he would close his eyes as he ran; I knew that so he would pitch on his knees when he reached safety. I assumed naturally that at Margaret’s feet lay safety even before I saw her arms brace him under the armpits with a gesture that was not passionate, but rather the movement of one carrying a wounded man from under fire. But even when she had raised his head to the level of her lips, the central issue was not decided. I covered my eyes and said aloud, “In a minute he will see her face, her hands.” But although it was a long time before I looked again, they were still clinging breast to breast. It was as though her embrace fed him, he looked so strong as he broke away. They stood with clasped hands looking at one another. They looked straight, they looked delightedly! And then, as if resuming a conversation tiresomely interrupted by some social obligation, they drew together again, and passed under the tossing branches of the cedar to the wood beyond. I reflected, while Kitty shrilly wept, how entirely right Chris had been in his assertion that to lovers innumerable things do not matter.

  CHAPTER V

  AFTER the automobile had taken Margaret away Chris ca
me to us as we sat in the drawing-room, and, after standing for a while in the glow of the fire, hesitantly said:

  “I want to tell you that I know it is all right. Margaret has explained to me.”

  Kitty crumpled her sewing into a white ball.

  “You mean, I suppose, that you know I’m your wife. I’m pleased that you describe that as knowing ‘it’s all right,’ and grateful that you have accepted it at last—on Margaret’s authority. This is an occasion that would make any wife proud.”

  Her irony was as faintly acrid as a caraway-seed, and never afterward did she reach even that low pitch of violence; for from that mild, forward droop of the head with which he received the mental lunge she realized suddenly that this was no pretense and that something as impassable as death lay between them. Thereafter his proceedings evoked no comment but suffering. There was nothing to say when all day, save for those hours of the afternoon that Margaret spent with him, he sat like a blind man waiting for his darkness to lift. There was nothing to say when he did not seem to see our flowers, yet kept till they rotted the daffodils which Margaret brought from the garden that looked like an allotment.