The Return of the Soldier, Rebecca West [paper ebook reader txt] 📗

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 brain-work.

“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 armchair 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