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

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 contact. 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.

When the butler who is not Griffiths had left the room he spoke gruffly.

“Stupid of me, I know; but where is Griffiths?”

“Dead seven years ago,” said Kitty, her eyes on her plate.

He sighed deeply in a shuddering horror.

“I’m sorry. He was a good man.”

I cleared my throat.

“There are new people here, Chris, but they love you as the old ones did.”

He forced himself to smile at us both, to a gay response.

“As if I didn’t know that tonight!”

But he did not know it. Even to me he would give no trust, because it was Jenny the girl who had been his friend and not Jenny the woman. All the inhabitants at this new tract of time were his enemies, all its circumstances his prison-bars. There was suspicion in the gesture with which, when we were back in the drawing-room he picked up the flannel from the work-table.

“Whose is this?” he said curiously. His mother had been a hard-riding woman, not apt with her needle.

“Clothes for one of the cottages,” answered Kitty, breathlessly. “We—we’ve a lot of responsibilities, you and I. With all of the land you’ve bought, there are ever so many people to look after.”

He moved his shoulders uneasily, as if under a yoke, and, after he had drunk his coffee, pulled up one of the blinds and went out to pace the flagged walk under the windows. Kitty huddled carelessly by the fire, her hands over her face, unheeding by its red glow she looked not so virginal and bride-like; so I think she was too distracted even to plan. I went to the piano. Through this evening of sentences cut short because their completed meaning was always sorrow, of normal life dissolved to tears, the chords of Beethoven sounded serenely.

“So you like Jenny,” said Kitty, suddenly, “to play Beethoven when it’s the war that’s caused all this. I could have told that you would have chosen to play German music this night of all nights.”

So I began a saraband by Purcell, a jolly thing that makes one see a plump, sound woman dancing on a sanded floor in some old inn, with casks of good ale all about her and a world of sunshine and May lanes without. As I played I wondered if things like this happened when Purcell wrote such music, empty of everything except laughter and simple greeds and satisfactions and at worst the wail of unrequited love. Why had modern life brought forth these horrors, which made the old tragedies seem no more than nursery-shows? And the sky also is different. Behind Chris’s head, as he halted at the open window, a search-light turned all ways in the night, like a sword brandished among the stars.

“Kitty.”

“Yes, Chris.” She was sweet and obedient and alert.

“I know my conduct must seem to you perversely insulting, “—behind him the search-light wheeled while he gripped the sides of the window,—“but if I do not see Margaret Allington I shall die.”

She raised her hands to her jewels, and pressed the cool globes of her pearls into her flesh. “She lives near here,” she said easily. “I will send the car down for her to-morrow. You shall see as much of her as you like.”

His arms fell to his sides.

“Thank you,” he muttered; “you’re all being so kind—” He disengaged himself into the darkness.

I was amazed at Kitty’s beautiful act and more amazed to find that it had made her face ugly. Her eyes snapped as they met mine.

“That dowd!” she said, keeping her voice low, so that he might not hear it as he passed to and fro before the window. “That dowd!”

This sudden abandonment of beauty and amiability meant so much in our Kitty, whose law of life is grace, that I went over and kissed her.

“Dear, you’re taking things all the wrong way,” I said. “Chris is ill—”

“He’s well enough to remember her all right,” she replied unanswerably. Her silver shoe tapped the floor; she pinched her lips for some moments. “After all, I suppose I can sit down to it. Other women do. Teddy Rex keeps a Gaiety girl, and Mrs. Rex has to grin and bear it.” She shrugged in answer to my silence. “What else is it, do you think? It means that Chris is a man like other men. But I did think that bad women were pretty. I suppose he’s had so much to do with pretty ones that a plain one’s a change.”

“Kitty! Kitty! how can you!”

But her little pink mouth went on manufacturing malice.

“This is all a blind,” she said at the end of an unpardonable sentence. “He’s pretending.”

I, who had felt his agony all the evening like a wound in my own body, was past speech then, and I did not care what I did to stop her. I gripped her small shoulders with my large hands, and shook her till her jewels rattled and she scratched my fingers and gasped for breath. But I did not mind so long as she was silent.

Chris spoke from the darkness.

“Jenny!” I let her go. He came and stood over us, running his hand through his hair unhappily. “Let’s all be decent to each other,” he said heavily. “It’s all such a muddle, and it’s so rotten for all of us—”

Kitty shook herself neat and stood up.

“Why don’t you say, ‘Jenny, you mustn’t be rude to visitors’? It is how you feel, I know.” She gathered up her needlework. “I’m going to bed. It’s been a horrid night.”

She spoke so pathetically, like a child who hasn’t enjoyed a party as much as it had thought it would, that both of us felt a stir of tenderness toward her as she left the room. We smiled sadly at each other as we sat down by the fire, and I perceived that, perhaps because I was flushed and looked younger, he felt more intimate with me than he had yet done since his return. Indeed, in the warm, friendly silence that followed he was like a patient when tiring visitors have gone and he is left alone with his trusted nurse; smiled under drooped lids and then paid me the high compliment of disregard. His limbs relaxed, he sank back into his chair. I watched him vigilantly, and was ready at that moment when thought intruded into his drowsings and his face began to twitch. I asked:

“You can’t remember her at all?”

“Oh, yes,” he said, without raising his eyelids, “in a sense. I know how she bows when you meet her in the street, how she dresses when she goes to church. I know her as one knows a woman stay-ing in the same hotel, just like that.”

“It’s a pity you can’t remember Kitty. All that a wife should be she’s been to you.”

He sat forward, warming his palms at the blaze and hunching his shoulders as though there were a draft. His silence compelled me to look at him, and I found his eyes, cold and incredulous and frightened, on me.

“Jenny, is this true?”

“That Kitty’s been a good wife?”

“That Kitty is my wife, that I am old, that”—he waved a hand at the altered room—“all this.”

“It is all true. She is your wife, and this place is changed, and it’s better and jollier in all sorts of ways, believe me, and fifteen years have passed. Why, Chris, can’t you see that I have grown old?” My vanity could hardly endure his slow stare, but I kept my fingers clasped on my lap. “You see?”

He turned away with an assenting mutter; but I saw that deep down in him, not to be moved by any material proof, his spirit was incredulous.

“Tell me what seems real to you,” I begged. “Chris, be a pal. I’ll never tell.”

“M-m-m,” he said. His elbows were on his knees, and his hands stroked his thick tarnished hair. I could not see his face, but I knew that his skin was red and that his gray eyes were wet and bright. Then suddenly he lifted his chin and laughed, like a happy swimmer breaking through a wave that has swept him far inshore. He glowed with a radiance that illuminated the moment till my blood tingled and I began to rub my hands together and laugh, too. “Why, Monkey Island’s real. But you don’t know old Monkey. Let me tell you.”