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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Return of the Soldier, by Rebecca West
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Return of the Soldier
+
+Author: Rebecca West
+
+Release Date: August 24, 2011 [EBook #37189]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was
+produced from scanned images of public domain material
+from the Google Print project.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: frontispiece]
+
+
+
+
+THE RETURN
+OF THE SOLDIER
+
+BY
+REBECCA WEST
+
+NEW [Illustration: colophon] YORK
+
+GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1918,
+BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
+
+THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER
+-C-
+PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+He lay there in the confiding relaxation of
+a child                                     _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                    FACING
+                                                      PAGE
+
+"Give it a brush now and then, like a good
+soul"                                                    6
+
+She would get into the four-foot punt that
+was used as a ferry and bring it over very
+slowly                                                  66
+
+"I oughtn't to do it, ought I?"                        176
+
+
+
+
+THE RETURN
+OF THE SOLDIER
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+"Ah, don't begin to fuss!" wailed Kitty. "If a woman began to worry in
+these days because her husband hadn't written to her for a fortnight!
+Besides, if he'd been anywhere interesting, anywhere where the fighting
+was really hot, he'd have found some way of telling me instead of just
+leaving it as 'Somewhere in France.' He'll be all right."
+
+We were sitting in the nursery. I had not meant to enter it again, now
+that the child was dead; but I had come suddenly on Kitty as she slipped
+the key into the lock, and I had lingered to look in at the high room,
+so full of whiteness and clear colors, so unendurably gay and familiar,
+which is kept in all respects as though there were still a child in the
+house. It was the first lavish day of spring, and the sunlight was
+pouring through the tall, arched windows and the flowered curtains so
+brightly that in the old days a fat fist would certainly have been
+raised to point out the new, translucent glories of the rosebud.
+Sunlight was lying in great pools on the blue cork floor and the soft
+rugs, patterned with strange beasts, and threw dancing beams, which
+should have been gravely watched for hours, on the white paint and the
+blue distempered walls. It fell on the rocking-horse, which had been
+Chris's idea of an appropriate present for his year-old son, and showed
+what a fine fellow he was and how tremendously dappled; it picked out
+Mary and her little lamb on the chintz ottoman. And along the
+mantelpiece, under the loved print of the snarling tiger, in attitudes
+that were at once angular and relaxed, as though they were ready for
+play at their master's pleasure, but found it hard to keep from drowsing
+in this warm weather, sat the Teddy Bear and the chimpanzee and the
+woolly white dog and the black cat with eyes that roll. Everything was
+there except Oliver. I turned away so that I might not spy on Kitty
+revisiting her dead. But she called after me:
+
+"Come here, Jenny. I'm going to dry my hair." And when I looked again I
+saw that her golden hair was all about her shoulders and that she wore
+over her frock a little silken jacket trimmed with rosebuds. She looked
+so like a girl on a magazine cover that one expected to find a large "15
+cents" somewhere attached to her person. She had taken Nanny's big
+basket-chair from its place by the high-chair, and was pushing it over
+to the middle window. "I always come in here when Emery has washed my
+hair. It's the sunniest room in the house. I wish Chris wouldn't have
+it kept as a nursery when there's no chance--" She sat down, swept her
+hair over the back of the chair into the sunlight, and held out to me
+her tortoiseshell hair-brush. "Give it a brush now and then, like a good
+soul; but be careful. Tortoise snaps so!"
+
+I took the brush and turned to the window, leaning my forehead against
+the glass and staring unobservantly at the view. You probably know the
+beauty of that view; for when Chris rebuilt Baldry Court after his
+marriage he handed it over to architects who had not so much the wild
+eye of the artist as the knowing wink of the manicurist, and between
+them they massaged the dear old place into matter for innumerable
+photographs in the illustrated papers. The house lies on the crest of
+Harrowweald, and from its windows the eye drops to miles of emerald
+pasture-land lying wet and brilliant under a westward line of sleek
+hills; blue with distance and distant woods, while nearer it range the
+suave decorum of the lawn and the Lebanon cedar, the branches of which
+are like darkness made palpable, and the minatory gauntnesses of the
+topmost pines in the wood that breaks downward, its bare boughs a close
+texture of browns and purples, from the pond on the edge of the hill.
+
+[Illustration: "Give it a brush now and then, like a good soul"]
+
+That day its beauty was an affront to me, because, like most
+Englishwomen of my time, I was wishing for the return of a soldier.
+Disregarding the national interest and everything else except the keen
+prehensile gesture of our hearts toward him, I wanted to snatch my
+Cousin Christopher from the wars and seal him in this green pleasantness
+his wife and I now looked upon. Of late I had had bad dreams about him.
+By nights I saw Chris running across the brown rottenness of
+No-Man's-Land, starting back here because he trod upon a hand, not even
+looking there because of the awfulness of an unburied head, and not till
+my dream was packed full of horror did I see him pitch forward on his
+knees as he reached safety, if it was that. For on the war-films I have
+seen men slip down as softly from the trench-parapet, and none but the
+grimmer philosophers could say that they had reached safety by their
+fall. And when I escaped into wakefulness it was only to lie stiff and
+think of stories I had heard in the boyish voice of the modern
+subaltern, which rings indomitable, yet has most of its gay notes
+flattened: "We were all of us in a barn one night, and a shell came
+along. My pal sang out, 'Help me, old man; I've got no legs!' and I had
+to answer, 'I can't, old man; I've got no hands!'" Well, such are the
+dreams of Englishwomen to-day. I could not complain, but I wished for
+the return of our soldier. So I said:
+
+"I wish we could hear from Chris. It is a fortnight since he wrote."
+
+And then it was that Kitty wailed, "Ah, don't begin to fuss!" and bent
+over her image in a hand-mirror as one might bend for refreshment over
+scented flowers.
+
+I tried to build about me such a little globe of ease as always
+ensphered her, and thought of all that remained good in our lives though
+Chris was gone. I was sure that we were preserved from the reproach of
+luxury, because we had made a fine place for Chris, one little part of
+the world that was, so far as surfaces could make it so, good enough for
+his amazing goodness. Here we had nourished that surpassing amiability
+which was so habitual that one took it as one of his physical
+characteristics, and regarded any lapse into bad temper as a calamity as
+startling as the breaking of a leg; here we had made happiness
+inevitable for him. I could shut my eyes and think of innumerable
+proofs of how well we had succeeded, for there never was so visibly
+contented a man. And I recalled all that he did one morning just a year
+ago when he went to the front.
+
+First he had sat in the morning-room and talked and stared out on the
+lawns that already had the desolation of an empty stage, although he had
+not yet gone; then broke off suddenly and went about the house, looking
+into many rooms. He went to the stables and looked at the horses and had
+the dogs brought out; he refrained from touching them or speaking to
+them, as though he felt himself already infected with the squalor of war
+and did not want to contaminate their bright physical well-being. Then
+he went to the edge of the wood and stood staring down into the clumps
+of dark-leaved rhododendrons and the yellow tangle of last year's
+bracken and the cold winter black of the trees. (From this very window I
+had spied on him.) Then he moved broodingly back to the house to be
+with his wife until the moment of his going, when Kitty and I stood on
+the steps to see him motor off to Waterloo. He kissed us both. As he
+bent over me I noticed once again how his hair was of two colors, brown
+and gold. Then he got into the car, put on his Tommy air, and said: "So
+long! I'll write you from Berlin!" and as he spoke his head dropped
+back, and he set a hard stare on the house. That meant, I knew, that he
+loved the life he had lived with us and desired to carry with him to the
+dreary place of death and dirt the complete memory of everything about
+his home, on which his mind could brush when things were at their worst,
+as a man might finger an amulet through his shirt. This house, this life
+with us, was the core of his heart.
+
+"If he could come back!" I said. "He was so happy here!"
+
+And Kitty answered:
+
+"He could not have been happier."
+
+It was important that he should have been happy, for, you see, he was
+not like other city men. When we had played together as children in that
+wood he had always shown great faith in the imminence of the improbable.
+He thought that the birch-tree would really stir and shrink and quicken
+into an enchanted princess, that he really was a red Indian, and that
+his disguise would suddenly fall from him at the right sundown, that at
+any moment a tiger might lift red fangs through the bracken, and he
+expected these things with a stronger motion of the imagination than the
+ordinary child's make-believe. And from a thousand intimations, from his
+occasional clear fixity of gaze on good things as though they were about
+to dissolve into better, from the passionate anticipation with which he
+went to new countries or met new people, I was aware that this faith had
+persisted into his adult life. He had exchanged his expectation of
+becoming a red Indian for the equally wistful aspiration of becoming
+completely reconciled to life. It was his hopeless hope that some time
+he would have an experience that would act on his life like alchemy,
+turning to gold all the dark metals of events, and from that revelation
+he would go on his way rich with an inextinguishable joy. There had
+been, of course, no chance of his ever getting it. Literally there
+wasn't room to swing a revelation in his crowded life. First of all, at
+his father's death he had been obliged to take over a business that was
+weighted by the needs of a mob of female relatives who were all useless
+either in the old way, with antimacassars, or in the new way, with
+golf-clubs; then Kitty had come along and picked up his conception of
+normal expenditure, and carelessly stretched it as a woman stretches a
+new glove on her hand. Then there had been the difficult task of
+learning to live after the death of his little son. It had lain on us,
+the responsibility, which gave us dignity, to compensate him for his
+lack of free adventure by arranging him a gracious life. But now, just
+because our performance had been so brilliantly adequate, how dreary was
+the empty stage!
+
+We were not, perhaps, specially contemptible women, because nothing
+could ever really become a part of our life until it had been referred
+to Chris's attention. I remember thinking, as the parlor-maid came in
+with a card on the tray, how little it mattered who had called and what
+flag of prettiness or wit she flew, since there was no chance that Chris
+would come in and stand over her, his fairness red in the firelight, and
+show her that detached attention, such as an unmusical man pays to good
+music, which men of anchored affections give to attractive women.
+
+Kitty read from the card:
+
+"'Mrs. William Grey, Mariposa, Ladysmith Road, Wealdstone,' I don't know
+anybody in _Wealdstone_." That is the name of the red suburban stain
+which fouls the fields three miles nearer London than Harrowweald. One
+cannot now protect one's environment as one once could. "Do I know her,
+Ward? Has she been here before?"
+
+"Oh, no, ma'am." The parlor-maid smiled superciliously. "She said she
+had news for you." From her tone one could deduce an over-confiding
+explanation made by a shabby visitor while using the door-mat almost too
+zealously.
+
+Kitty pondered, then said:
+
+"I'll come down." As the girl went, Kitty took up the amber hair-pins
+from her lap and began swathing her hair about her head. "Last year's
+fashion," she commented; "but I fancy it'll do for a person with that
+sort of address." She stood up, and threw her little silk
+dressing-jacket over the rocking-horse. "I'm seeing her because she may
+need something, and I specially want to be kind to people while Chris is
+away. One wants to deserve well of heaven." For a minute she was aloof
+in radiance, but as we linked arms and went out into the corridor she
+became more mortal, with a pout. "The people that come breaking into
+one's nice, quiet day!" she moaned reproachfully, and as we came to the
+head of the broad stair-case she leaned over the white balustrade to
+peer down on the hall, and squeezed my arm. "Look!" she whispered.
+
+Just beneath us, in one of Kitty's prettiest chintz arm-chairs, sat a
+middle-aged woman. She wore a yellowish raincoat and a black hat with
+plumes. The sticky straw hat had only lately been renovated by something
+out of a little bottle bought at the chemist's. She had rolled her black
+thread gloves into a ball on her lap, so that she could turn her gray
+alpaca skirt well above her muddy boots and adjust its brush-braid with
+a seamed red hand that looked even more worn when she presently raised
+it to touch the glistening flowers of the pink azalea that stood on a
+table beside her. Kitty shivered, then muttered:
+
+"Let's get this over," and ran down the stairs. On the last step she
+paused and said with conscientious sweetness, "Mrs. Grey!"
+
+"Yes," answered the visitor. She lifted to Kitty a sallow and relaxed
+face the expression of which gave me a sharp, pitying pang of
+prepossession in her favor: it was beautiful that so plain a woman
+should so ardently rejoice in another's loveliness. "Are you Mrs.
+Baldry?" she asked, almost as if she were glad about it, and stood up.
+The bones of her bad stays clicked as she moved. Well, she was not so
+bad. Her body was long and round and shapely, and with a noble
+squareness of the shoulders; her fair hair curled diffidently about a
+good brow; her gray eyes, though they were remote, as if anything worth
+looking at in her life had kept a long way off, were full of tenderness;
+and though she was slender, there was something about her of the
+wholesome, endearing heaviness of the ox or the trusted big dog. Yet she
+was bad enough. She was repulsively furred with neglect and poverty, as
+even a good glove that has dropped down behind a bed in a hotel and has
+lain undisturbed for a day or two is repulsive when the chambermaid
+retrieves it from the dust and fluff.
+
+She flung at us as we sat down:
+
+"My general maid is sister to your second housemaid."
+
+It left us at a loss.
+
+"You've come about a reference?" asked Kitty.
+
+"Oh, no. I've had Gladys two years now, and I've always found her a very
+good girl. I want no reference." With her finger-nail she followed the
+burst seam of the dark pigskin purse that slid about on her shiny alpaca
+lap. "But girls talk, you know. You mustn't blame them." She seemed to
+be caught in a thicket of embarrassment, and sat staring up at the
+azalea.
+
+With the hardness of a woman who sees before her the curse of women's
+lives, a domestic row, Kitty said that she took no interest in servants'
+gossip.
+
+"Oh, it isn't--" her eyes brimmed as though we had been
+unkind--"servants' gossip that I wanted to talk about. I only mentioned
+Gladys"--she continued to trace the burst seam of her purse--"because
+that's how I heard you didn't know."
+
+"What don't I know?"
+
+Her head drooped a little.
+
+"About Mr. Baldry. Forgive me, I don't know his rank."
+
+"Captain Baldry," supplied Kitty, wonderingly. "What is it that I don't
+know?"
+
+She looked far away from us, to the open door and its view of dark pines
+and pale March sunshine, and appeared to swallow something.
+
+"Why, that he's hurt," she gently said.
+
+"Wounded, you mean?" asked Kitty.
+
+Her rusty plumes oscillated as she moved her mild face about with an air
+of perplexity.
+
+"Yes," she said, "he's wounded."
+
+Kitty's bright eyes met mine, and we obeyed that mysterious human
+impulse to smile triumphantly at the spectacle of a fellow-creature
+occupied in baseness. For this news was not true. It could not possibly
+be true. The War Office would have wired to us immediately if Chris had
+been wounded. This was such a fraud as one sees recorded in the papers
+that meticulously record squalor in paragraphs headed, "Heartless Fraud
+on Soldier's Wife." Presently she would say that she had gone to some
+expense to come here with her news and that she was poor, and at the
+first generous look on our faces there would come some tale of trouble
+that would disgust the imagination by pictures of yellow-wood furniture
+that a landlord oddly desired to seize and a pallid child with bandages
+round its throat. I cast down my eyes and shivered at the horror. Yet
+there was something about the physical quality of the woman, unlovely
+though she was, which preserved the occasion from utter baseness. I felt
+sure that had it not been for the tyrannous emptiness of that evil,
+shiny pigskin purse that jerked about on her trembling knees the poor
+driven creature would have chosen ways of candor and gentleness. It was,
+strangely enough, only when I looked at Kitty and marked how her
+brightly colored prettiness arched over this plain criminal as though
+she were a splendid bird of prey and this her sluggish insect food that
+I felt the moment degrading.
+
+Kitty was, I felt, being a little too clever over it.
+
+"How is he wounded?" she asked.
+
+The caller traced a pattern on the carpet with her blunt toe.
+
+"I don't know how to put it; he's not exactly wounded. A shell burst--"
+
+"Concussion?" suggested Kitty.
+
+She answered with an odd glibness and humility, as though tendering us a
+term she had long brooded over without arriving at comprehension, and
+hoping that our superior intelligences would make something of it:
+
+"Shell-shock." Our faces did not illumine, so she dragged on lamely,
+"Anyway, he's not well." Again she played with her purse. Her face was
+visibly damp.
+
+"Not well? Is he dangerously ill?"
+
+"Oh, no." She was too kind to harrow us. "Not dangerously ill."
+
+Kitty brutally permitted a silence to fall. Our caller could not bear
+it, and broke it in a voice that nervousness had turned to a funny,
+diffident croak.
+
+"He's in the Queen Mary Hospital at Boulogne." We did not speak, and she
+began to flush and wriggle on her seat, and stooped forward to fumble
+under the legs of her chair for her umbrella. The sight of its green
+seams and unveracious tortoiseshell handle disgusted Kitty into speech.
+
+"How do you know all this?"
+
+Our visitor met her eyes. This was evidently a moment for which she had
+steeled herself, and she rose to it with a catch of her breath. "A man
+who used to be a clerk along with my husband is in Mr. Baldry's
+regiment." Her voice croaked even more piteously, and her eyes begged:
+"Leave it at that! Leave it at that! If you only knew--"
+
+"And what regiment is that?" pursued Kitty.
+
+The poor sallow face shone with sweat.
+
+"I never thought to ask," she said.
+
+"Well, your friend's name--"
+
+Mrs. Grey moved on her seat so suddenly and violently that the pigskin
+purse fell from her lap and lay at my feet. I supposed that she cast it
+from her purposely because its emptiness had brought her to this
+humiliation, and that the scene would close presently in a few quiet
+tears.
+
+I hoped that Kitty would let her go without scarring her too much with
+words and would not mind if I gave her a little money. There was no
+doubt in my mind but that this queer, ugly episode in which this woman
+butted like a clumsy animal at a gate she was not intelligent enough to
+open would dissolve and be replaced by some more pleasing composition in
+which we would take our proper parts; in which, that is, she would turn
+from our rightness ashamed. Yet she cried:
+
+"But Chris is ill!"
+
+It took only a second for the compact insolence of the moment to
+penetrate, the amazing impertinence of the use of his name, the
+accusation of callousness she brought against us whose passion for Chris
+was our point of honor, because we would not shriek at her false news,
+the impudently bright, indignant gaze she flung at us, the lift of her
+voice that pretended she could not understand our coolness and
+irrelevance. I pushed the purse away from me with my toe, and hated her
+as the rich hate the poor as insect things that will struggle out of the
+crannies which are their decent home and introduce ugliness to the light
+of day. And Kitty said in a voice shaken with pitilessness:
+
+"You are impertinent. I know exactly what you are doing. You have read
+in the 'Harrow Observer' or somewhere that my husband is at the front,
+and you come to tell this story because you think that you will get some
+money. I've read of such cases in the papers. You forget that if
+anything had happened to my husband the War Office would have told me.
+You should think yourself very lucky that I don't hand you over to the
+police." She shrilled a little before she came to the end. "Please go!"
+
+"Kitty!" I breathed. I was so ashamed that such a scene should spring
+from Chris's peril at the front that I wanted to go out into the garden
+and sit by the pond until the poor thing had removed her deplorable
+umbrella, her unpardonable raincoat, her poor frustrated fraud. But Mrs.
+Grey, who had begun childishly and deliberately, "It's _you_ who are
+being--" and had desisted simply because she realized that there were no
+harsh notes on her lyre, and that she could not strike these chords
+that others found so easy, had fixed me with a certain wet, clear,
+patient gaze. It is the gift of animals and those of peasant stock. From
+the least regarded, from an old horse nosing over a gate, or a drab in a
+work-house ward, it wrings the heart. From this woman--I said
+checkingly:
+
+"Kitty!" and reconciled her in an undertone. "There's some mistake. Got
+the name wrong, perhaps. Please tell us all about it."
+
+Mrs. Grey began a forward movement like a curtsy. She was groveling
+after that purse. When she rose, her face was pink from stooping, and
+her dignity swam uncertainly in a sea of half-shed tears. She said:
+
+"I'm sorry I've upset you. But when you know a thing like that it isn't
+in flesh and blood to keep it from his wife. I am a married woman
+myself, and I know. I knew Mr. Baldry fifteen years ago." Her voice
+freely confessed that she had taken a liberty. "Quite a friend of the
+family he was." She had added that touch to soften the crude
+surprisingness of her announcement. It hardly did. "We lost sight of
+each other. It's fifteen years since we last met. I had never seen nor
+heard of him nor thought to do again till I got this a week ago."
+
+She undid the purse and took out a telegram. I knew suddenly that all
+she said was true; for that was why her hands had clasped that purse.
+
+"He isn't well! He isn't well!" she said pleadingly. "He's lost his
+memory, and thinks--thinks he still knows me."
+
+She passed the telegram to Kitty, who read it, and laid it on her knee.
+
+"See," said Mrs. Grey, "it's addressed to Margaret Allington, my maiden
+name, and I've been married these ten years. And it was sent to my old
+home, Monkey Island, at Bray. Father kept the inn there. It's fifteen
+years since we left it. I never should have got this telegram if me and
+my husband hadn't been down there last September and told the folks who
+keep it now who I was."
+
+Kitty folded up the telegram and said in a little voice:
+
+"This is a likely story."
+
+Again Mrs. Grey's eyes brimmed. "People are rude to one," she visibly
+said, but surely not nice people like this. She simply continued to sit.
+
+Kitty cried out, as though arguing:
+
+"There's nothing about shell-shock in this wire."
+
+Our visitor melted into a trembling shyness.
+
+"There was a letter, too."
+
+Kitty held out her hand.
+
+She gasped:
+
+"Oh, no, I couldn't do that!"
+
+"I must have it," said Kitty.
+
+The caller's eyes grew great. She rose and dived clumsily for her
+umbrella, which had again slipped under the chair.
+
+"I can't," she cried, and scurried to the open door like a pelted dog.
+She would have run down the steps at once had not some tender thought
+arrested her. She turned to me trustfully and stammered, "He is at that
+hospital I said," as if, since I had dealt her no direct blow, I might
+be able to salve the news she brought from the general wreck of manners.
+And then Kitty's stiff pallor struck to her heart, and cried
+comfortingly across the distance, "I tell you, I haven't seen him for
+fifteen years." She faced about, pushed down her hat on her head, and
+ran down the steps to the gravel. "They won't understand!" we heard her
+sob.
+
+For a long time we watched her as she went along the drive, her
+yellowish raincoat looking sick and bright in the sharp sunshine, her
+black plumes nodding like the pines above, her cheap boots making her
+walk on her heels, a spreading stain on the fabric of our life. When she
+was quite hidden by the dark clump of rhododendrons at the corner, Kitty
+turned and went to the fireplace. She laid her arms against the oak
+mantel-piece and cooled her face against her arms.
+
+When at last I followed her she said:
+
+"Do you believe her?"
+
+I started. I had forgotten that we had ever disbelieved her.
+
+"Yes," I replied.
+
+"What can it mean?" She dropped her arms and stared at me imploringly.
+"Think, think, of something it can mean which isn't detestable!"
+
+"It's all a mystery," I said; and added madly, because nobody had ever
+been cross with Kitty, "You didn't help to clear it up."
+
+"Oh, I know you think I was rude," she petulantly moaned; "but you're
+so slow you don't see what it means. Either it means that he's mad, our
+Chris, our splendid, sane Chris, all broken and queer, not knowing us--I
+can't bear to think of that. It can't be true. But if he isn't--Jenny,
+there was nothing in that telegram to show he'd lost his memory. It was
+just affection--a name that might have been a pet name, things that it
+was a little common to put in a telegram. It's queer he should have
+written such a message, queer that he shouldn't have told me about
+knowing her, queer that he ever should have known such a woman. It shows
+there are bits of him we don't know. Things may be awfully wrong. It's
+all such a breach of trust! I resent it."
+
+I was appalled by these stiff, dignified gestures that seemed to be
+plucking Chris's soul from his body, tormented though it was by this
+unknown calamity.
+
+"But Chris is ill!" I cried.
+
+She stared at me.
+
+"You're saying what she said."
+
+Indeed, there seemed no better words than those Mrs. Grey had used. I
+repeated:
+
+"But he is ill!"
+
+She laid her face against her arms again.
+
+"What does that matter?" she wailed. "If he could send that telegram, he
+is no longer ours."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+I was sorry the next morning that the post comes too late at Harrowweald
+to be brought up with the morning tea and waits for one at the breakfast
+table; for under Kitty's fixed gaze I had to open a letter which bore
+the Boulogne postmark and was addressed in the writing of Frank Baldry,
+Chris's cousin, who is in the church. He wrote:
+
+         DEAR JENNY:
+
+     You will have to break it to Kitty and try to make her take it as
+     quietly as possible. This sentence will sound ominous as a start,
+     but I'm so full of the extraordinary thing that has happened to
+     Chris that I feel as if every living creature was in possession of
+     the facts. I don't know how much you know about it, so I'd better
+     begin at the beginning. Last Thursday I got a wire from Chris,
+     saying that he had had concussion, though not seriously, and was in
+     a hospital about a mile from Boulogne, where he would be glad to
+     see me. It struck me as odd that it had been sent to Ollenshaws,
+     where I was curate fifteen years ago. Fortunately, I have always
+     kept in touch with Sumpter, whom I regard as a specimen of the very
+     best type of country clergymen, and he forwarded it without
+     unnecessary delay. I started that evening, and looked hard for you
+     and Kitty on the boat; but came to the conclusion I should probably
+     find you at the hospital.
+
+     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-and-bull 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 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 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 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
+stair-case, 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 arm-chair 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 fingered 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 country-side 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 to-night!"
+
+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 in 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's 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 staying 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."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+Chris told the story lingeringly, in loving detail. From Uncle Ambrose's
+gates, it seems, one took the path across the meadow where Whiston's
+cows are put to graze, passed through the second stile--the one between
+the two big alders--into a long straight road that ran across the flat
+lands to Bray. After a mile or so there branched from it a private road
+that followed a line of noble poplars down to the ferry. Between two of
+them--he described it meticulously, as though it were of immense
+significance--there stood a white hawthorn. In front were the
+dark-green, glassy waters of an unvisited back-water, and beyond them a
+bright lawn set with many walnut-trees and a few great chestnuts, well
+lighted with their candles, and to the left of that a low, white house
+with a green dome rising in its middle, and a veranda with a roof of
+hammered iron that had gone verdigris-color with age and the Thames
+weather. This was the Monkey Island Inn. The third Duke of Marlborough
+had built it for a "folly," and perching there with nothing but a line
+of walnut-trees and a fringe of lawn between it and the fast, full,
+shining Thames, it had an eighteenth-century grace and silliness.
+
+Well, one sounded the bell that hung on a post, and presently Margaret
+in a white dress would come out of the porch and would walk to the stone
+steps down to the river. Invariably, as she passed the walnut-tree that
+overhung the path, she would pick a leaf, crush it, and sniff the sweet
+scent; and as she came near the steps she would shade her eyes and peer
+across the water. "She is a little near-sighted; you can't imagine how
+sweet it makes her look," Chris explained. (I did not say that I had
+seen her, for, indeed, this Margaret I had never seen.) A sudden serene
+gravity would show that she had seen one, and she would get into the
+four-foot punt that was used as a ferry and bring it over very slowly,
+with rather stiff movements of her long arms, to exactly the right
+place. When she had got the punt up on the gravel her serious brow would
+relax, and she would smile at one and shake hands and say something
+friendly, like, "Father thought you'd be over this afternoon, it being
+so fine; so he's saved some duck's eggs for tea."
+
+And then one took the pole from her and brought her back to the island,
+though probably one did not mount the steps to the lawn for a long time.
+It was so good to sit in the punt by the landing-stage while Margaret
+dabbled her hands in the black waters and forgot her shyness as one
+talked. "She's such good company. She's got an accurate mind that
+would have made her a good engineer, but when she picks up facts she
+kind of gives them a motherly hug. She's charity and love itself."
+(Again I did not say that I had seen her.) If people drifted in to tea,
+one had to talk to her while she cut the bread and butter and the
+sandwiches in the kitchen, but in this year of floods few visitors cared
+to try the hard rowing below Bray Lock.
+
+[Illustration: She would get into the four-foot punt that was used as a
+ferry and bring it over very slowly]
+
+So usually one sat down there in the boat, talking with a sense of
+leisure, as though one had all the rest of one's life in which to carry
+on this conversation, and noting how the reflected ripple of the water
+made a bright, vibrant, mark upon her throat, and other effects of the
+scene upon her beauty, until the afternoon grew drowsy, and she said,
+"Father will be wanting his tea." And they would go up and find old
+Allington, in white ducks, standing in the fringe of long grasses and
+cow-parsley on the other edge of the island, looking to his poultry or
+his rabbits. He was a little man, with a tuft of copper-colored hair
+rising from the middle of his forehead like a clown's curl, who shook
+hands hard and explained very soon that he was a rough diamond.
+
+Then they all had tea under the walnut-tree where the canary's cage was
+hanging, and the ducks' eggs would be brought out, and Mr. Allington
+would talk much Thames-side gossip: how the lock-keeper at Teddington
+had had his back broken by a swan, mad as swans are in May; how they
+would lose their license at the Dovetail Arms if they were not careful;
+and how the man who kept the inn by Surly Hall was like to die, because
+after he had been cursing his daughter for two days for having run away
+with a soldier from Windsor Barracks, he had suddenly seen her white
+face in a clump of rushes in the river just under the hole in the
+garden fence. Margaret would sit quiet, round-eyed at the world's ways,
+and shy because of Chris.
+
+So they would sit on that bright lawn until the day was dyed with
+evening blue, and Mr. Allington was more and more often obliged to leap
+into the punt to chase his ducks, which had started on a trip to Bray
+Lock, or to crawl into the undergrowth after rabbits similarly
+demoralized by the dusk.
+
+Then Chris would say he had to go, and they would stand in a communing
+silence while the hearty voice of Mr. Allington shouted from midstream
+or under the alder-boughs a disregarded invitation to stay and have a
+bite of supper. In the liquefaction of colors which happens on a summer
+evening, when the green grass seemed like a precious fluid poured out on
+the earth and dripping over to the river, and the chestnut candles were
+no longer proud flowers, but just wet, white lights in the humid mass
+of the tree, when the brown earth seemed just a little denser than the
+water, Margaret also participated.
+
+Chris explained this part of his story stumblingly; but I, too, have
+watched people I loved in the dusk, and I know what he meant. As she sat
+in the punt while he ferried himself across it was no longer visible
+that her fair hair curled differently and that its rather wandering
+parting was a little on one side; that her straight brows, which were a
+little darker than her hair, were nearly always contracted in a frown of
+conscientious speculation; that her mouth and chin were noble, yet as
+delicate as flowers; that her shoulders were slightly hunched because
+her young body, like a lily-stem, found it difficult to manage its own
+tallness. She was then just a girl in white who lifted a white face or
+drooped a dull-gold head. Then she was nearer to him than at any other
+time. That he loved her in this twilight, which obscured all the
+physical details which he adored, seemed to him a guarantee that theirs
+was a changeless love which would persist if she were old or maimed or
+disfigured.
+
+He stood beside the crazy post where the bell hung and watched the white
+figure take the punt over the black waters, mount the gray steps, and
+assume some of their grayness, become a green shade in the green
+darkness of the foliage-darkened lawn, and he exulted in that guarantee.
+
+How long this went on he had forgotten; but it continued for some time
+before there came the end of his life, the last day he could remember. I
+was barred out of that day. His lips told me of its physical
+appearances, while from his wet, bright eyes and his flushed skin, his
+beautiful signs of a noble excitement, I tried to derive the real story.
+It seemed that the day when he bicycled over to Monkey Island, happy
+because Uncle Ambrose had gone up to town and he could stay to supper
+with the Allingtons, was the most glorious day the year had yet brought.
+The whole world seemed melting into light. Cumulus-clouds floated very
+high, like lumps of white light, against a deep, glowing sky, and
+dropped dazzling reflections on the beaming Thames. The trees moved not
+like timber, shocked by wind, but floatingly, like weeds at the bottom
+of a well of sunshine. When Margaret came out of the porch and paused,
+as she always did, to crush and smell the walnut-leaf and shade her eyes
+with her hand, her white dress shone like silver.
+
+[Illustration: He lay there in the confiding relaxation of a child]
+
+She brought the punt across and said very primly, "Dad will be
+disappointed; he's gone up to town on business," and answered gravely,
+"That is very kind of you," when he took the punt-pole from her and
+said laughingly: "Never mind. I'll come and see you all the same." (I
+could see them as Chris spoke, so young and pale and solemn, with the
+intense light spilling all around them.) That afternoon they did not sit
+in the punt by the landing-stage, but wandered about the island and
+played with the rabbits and looked at the ducks and were inordinately
+silent. For a long time they stood in the fringe of rough grass on the
+other side of the island, and Margaret breathed contentedly that the
+Thames was so beautiful. Past the spit of sand at the far end of the
+island, where a great swan swanked to the empty reach that it would
+protect its mate against all comers, the river opened to a silver
+breadth between flat meadows stretching back to far rows of pin-thick
+black poplars, until it wound away to Windsor behind a line of high
+trees whose heads were bronze with unopened buds, and whose flanks were
+hidden by a head of copper-beech and crimson and white hawthorn.
+
+Chris said he would take her down to Dorney Lock in the skiff, and she
+got in very silently and obediently; but as soon as they were out in
+midstream she developed a sense of duty, and said she could not leave
+the inn with just that boy to look after it. And then she went into the
+kitchen and, sucking in her lower lip for shyness, very conscientiously
+cut piles of bread and butter in case some visitors came to tea. Just
+when Chris was convincing her of the impossibility of any visitors
+arriving they came, a fat woman in a luscious pink blouse and an old
+chap who had been rowing in a tweed waistcoat. Chris went out, though
+Margaret laughed and trembled and begged him not to, and waited on them.
+It should have been a great lark, but suddenly he hated them, and when
+they offered him a tip for pushing the boat off, he snarled absurdly
+and ran back, miraculously relieved, to the bar-parlor.
+
+Still Margaret would not leave the island. "Supposing," she said, "that
+Mr. Learoyd comes for his ale." But she consented to walk with him to
+the wild part of the island, where poplars and alders and willows grew
+round a clearing in which white willow-herb and purple figwort and here
+and there a potato-flower, last ailing consequence of one of Mr.
+Allington's least successful enterprises, fought down to the fringe of
+iris on the river's lip. In this gentle jungle was a rustic seat, relic
+of a reckless aspiration on the part of Mr. Allington to make this a
+pleasure-garden, and on it they sat until a pale moon appeared above the
+green corn-field on the other side of the river. "Not six yet," he said,
+taking out his watch. "Not six yet," she repeated. Words seemed to bear
+more significance than they had ever borne before. Then a heron flapped
+gigantic in front of the moon, and swung in wide circles round the
+willow-tree before them. "Oh, look!" she cried. He seized the hand she
+flung upward and gathered her into his arms. They were so for long,
+while the great bird's wings beat about them.
+
+Afterward she pulled at his hand. She wanted to go back across the lawn
+and walk round the inn, which looked mournful, as unlit houses do by
+dusk. They passed beside the green-and-white stucco barrier of the
+veranda and stood on the three-cornered lawn that shelved high over the
+stream at the island's end, regarding the river, which was now something
+more wonderful than water, because it had taken to its bosom the rose
+and amber glories of the sunset smoldering behind the elms and Bray
+church-tower. Birds sat on the telegraph wires that spanned the river as
+the black notes sit on a staff of music. Then she went to the window of
+the parlor and rested her cheek against the glass, looking in. The
+little room was sad with twilight, and there was nothing to be seen but
+Margaret's sewing-machine on the table and the enlarged photograph of
+Margaret's mother over the mantel-piece, and the views of Tintern Abbey
+framed in red plush, and on the floor, the marigold pattern making
+itself felt through the dusk, Mr. Allington's carpet slippers. "Think of
+me sitting in there," she whispered, "not knowing you loved me." Then
+they went into the bar and drank milk, while she walked about fingering
+familiar things with an absurd expression of exaltation, as though that
+day she was fond of everything, even the handles of the beer-engine.
+
+When there had descended on them a night as brilliant as the day he drew
+her out into the darkness, which was sweet with the scent of
+walnut-leaves, and they went across the lawn, bending beneath the
+chestnut-boughs, not to the wild part of the island, but to a circle of
+smooth turf divided from it by a railing of wrought iron. On this stood
+a small Greek temple, looking very lovely in the moonlight. He had never
+brought Margaret here before, because Mr. Allington had once told him,
+spatulate forefinger at his nose, that it had been built for the "dook"
+for his excesses, and it was in the quality of his love for her that he
+could not bear to think of her in association with anything base. But
+to-night there was nothing anywhere but beauty. He lifted her in his
+arms and carried her within the columns, and made her stand in a niche
+above the altar. A strong stream of moonlight rushed upon her there; by
+its light he could not tell if her hair was white as silver or yellow as
+gold, and again he was filled with exaltation because he knew that it
+would not have mattered if it had been white. His love was changeless.
+Lifting her down from the niche, he told her so.
+
+And as he spoke, her warm body melted to nothingness in his arms. The
+columns that had stood so hard and black against the quivering tide of
+moonlight and starlight seemed to totter and dissolve. He was lying in a
+hateful world where barbed-wire entanglements showed impish knots
+against a livid sky full of blooming noise and splashes of fire and
+wails for water, and his back was hurting intolerably.
+
+Chris fell to blowing out the candles, and I, perhaps because the
+egotistical part of me was looking for something to say that would make
+him feel me devoted and intimate, could not speak.
+
+Suddenly he desisted, stared at a candle-flame, and said:
+
+"If you had seen the way she rested her cheek against the glass and
+looked into the little room you'd understand that I can't say, 'Yes,
+Kitty's my wife, and Margaret somehow just nothing at all.'"
+
+"Of course you can't," I murmured sympathetically.
+
+We gripped hands, and he brought down on our conversation the finality
+of darkness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+Next morning it appeared that the chauffeur had taken the car up to town
+to get a part replaced, and Margaret could not be brought from
+Wealdstone till the afternoon. It fell to me to fetch her. "At least,"
+Kitty had said, "I might be spared that humiliation." Before I started I
+went to the pond on the hill's edge. It is a place where autumn lives
+for half the year, for even when the spring lights tongues of green fire
+in the undergrowth, and the valley shows sunlit between the tree-trunks,
+here the pond is fringed with yellow bracken and tinted bramble, and the
+water flows amber over last winter's leaves.
+
+Through this brown gloom, darkened now by a surly sky, Chris was taking
+the skiff, standing in the stern and using his oar like a gondolier. He
+had come down here soon after breakfast, driven from the house by the
+strangeness of all but the outer walls, and discontented with the
+grounds because everything but this wet, intractable spot bore the marks
+of Kitty's genius. After lunch there had been another attempt to settle
+down, but with a grim glare at a knot of late Christmas roses bright in
+a copse that fifteen years ago had been dark he went back to the
+russet-eaved boat-house and this play with the skiff. It was a boy's
+sport, and it was dreadful to see him turn a middle-aged face as he
+brought the boat inshore.
+
+"I'm just going down to fetch Margaret," I said.
+
+He thanked me for it.
+
+"But, Chris, I must tell you. I've seen Margaret. She came up here, so
+kind and sweet, to tell us you were wounded. She's the greatest dear in
+the world, but she's not as you think of her. She's old, Chris. She
+isn't beautiful any longer. She's drearily married. She's seamed and
+scored and ravaged by squalid circumstances. You can't love her when you
+see her."
+
+"Didn't I tell you last night," he said, "that that doesn't matter?" He
+dipped his oar to a stroke that sent him away from me. "Bring her soon.
+I shall wait for her down here."
+
+Wealdstone is not, in its way, a bad place; it lies in the lap of open
+country, and at the end of every street rise the green hills of Harrow
+and the spires of Harrow School. But all the streets are long and red
+and freely articulated with railway arches, and factories spoil the
+skyline with red, angular chimneys, and in front of the shops stood
+little women with backs ridged by cheap stays, who tapped their upper
+lips with their forefingers and made other feeble, doubtful gestures,
+as though they wanted to buy something and knew that if they did they
+would have to starve some other appetite. When we asked them the way
+they turned to us faces sour with thrift. It was a town of people who
+could not do as they liked.
+
+And here Margaret lived in a long road of red-brick boxes, flecked here
+and there with the pink blur of almond-blossom, which debouched in a
+flat field where green grass rose up rank through clay mold blackened by
+coal-dust from the railway. Mariposa, which was the last house in the
+road, did not even have an almond-tree. In the front garden, which
+seemed to be imperfectly reclaimed from the greasy field, yellow crocus
+and some sodden squills just winked, and the back, where a man was
+handling a spade without mastery, presented the austere appearance of an
+allotment. And not only did Margaret live in this place; she also
+belonged to it. When she opened the door she gazed at me with watering
+eyes, and in perplexity stroked her disordered hair with a floury hand.
+Her face was sallow with heat, and beads of perspiration glittered in
+the deep, dragging line between her nostrils and the corners of her
+mouth. She said:
+
+"He's home?"
+
+I nodded.
+
+She pulled me inside and slammed the door.
+
+"Is he well?" she asked.
+
+"Quite," I answered.
+
+Her tense stare relaxed. She rubbed her hands on her overall and said:
+
+"You'll excuse me. It's the girl's day out. If you'll step into the
+parlor--"
+
+So in her parlor I sat and told her how it was with Chris and how
+greatly he desired to see her. And as I spoke of his longing I turned my
+eyes away from her, because she was sitting on a sofa, upholstered in
+velveteen of a sickish green, which was so low that her knees stuck up
+in front of her, and she had to clasp them with her seamed, floury
+hands. I could see that the skin of her face was damp. And my voice
+failed me as I looked round the room, because I saw just what Margaret
+had seen that evening fifteen years ago when she had laid her cheek to
+the parlor window at Monkey Island. There was the enlarged photograph of
+Margaret's mother over the mantelpiece, on the walls were the views of
+Tintern Abbey framed in red plush, between the rickety legs of the china
+cupboard was the sewing-machine, and tucked into the corner between my
+chair and the fender were a pair of carpet slippers. All her life long
+Margaret, who in her time had partaken of the supreme dignity of a
+requited love, had lived with men who wore carpet slippers in the house.
+I turned my eyes away again, and this time looked down the garden at the
+figure that was not so much digging as exhibiting his incapacity to
+deal with a spade. He was sneezing very frequently, and his sneezes made
+the unbuckled straps at the back of his waistcoat wag violently. I
+supposed him to be Mr. William Grey.
+
+I had finished the statement of our sad case, and I saw that though she
+had not moved, clasping her knees in a set, hideous attitude, the tears
+were rolling down her cheeks.
+
+"Oh, don't! Oh, don't!" I exclaimed, standing up. Her tear-stained
+immobility touched the heart. "He's not so bad; he'll get quite well."
+
+"I know, I know," she said miserably. "I don't believe that anything bad
+could be allowed to happen to Chris for long. And I'm sure," she said
+kindly, "you're looking after him beautifully. But when a thing you had
+thought had ended fifteen years ago starts all over again, and you're
+very tired--" She drew a hand across her tears, her damp skin, her
+rough, bagging overall. "I'm hot. I've been baking. You can't get a girl
+nowadays that understands the baking." Her gaze became remote and
+tender, and she said in a manner that was at once argumentative and
+narrative, as though she were telling the whole story to a neighbor over
+the garden wall: "I suppose I ought to say that he isn't right in his
+head, and that I'm married, so we'd better not meet; but, oh," she
+cried, and I felt as though, after much fumbling with damp matches and
+many doubts as to whether there was any oil in the wick, I had lit the
+lamp at last, "I want to see him so! It's wrong, I know it's wrong, but
+I am so glad Chris wants to see me, too!"
+
+"You'll do him good." I found myself raising my voice to the pitch she
+had suddenly attained as though to keep her at it. "Come now!"
+
+She dipped suddenly to compassion.
+
+"But the young lady?" she asked timidly. "She was upset the last time.
+I've often wondered if I did right in going. Even if Chris has
+forgotten, he'll want to do what's right. He couldn't bear to hurt her."
+
+"That's true," I said. "You do know our Chris. He watches her out of the
+corner of his eye, even when he's feeling at his worst, to see she isn't
+wincing. But she sent me here to-day."
+
+"Oh!" cried Margaret, glowing, "she must have a lovely nature!"
+
+I lost suddenly the thread of the conversation. I could not talk about
+Kitty. She appeared to me at that moment a faceless figure with
+flounces, just as most of the servants at Baldry Court appear to me as
+faceless figures with caps and aprons. There were only two real people
+in the world, Chris and this woman whose personality was sounding
+through her squalor like a beautiful voice singing in a darkened room,
+and I was absorbed in a mental vision of them. You know how the saints
+and the prophets are depicted in the steel engravings in old Bibles; so
+they were standing, in flowing white robes on rocks against a
+pitch-black sky, a strong light beating on their eyes upturned in
+ecstasy and their hand outstretched to receive the spiritual blessing of
+which the fierce rays were an emanation. Into that rapt silence I
+desired to break, and I whispered irrelevantly, "Oh, nothing, nothing is
+too good for Chris!" while I said to myself, "If she really were like
+that, solemn and beatified!" and my eyes returned to look despairingly
+on her ugliness. But she really was like that. She had responded to my
+irrelevant murmur of adoration by just such a solemn and beatified
+appearance as I had imagined. Her grave eyes were upturned, her worn
+hands lay palm upward on her knees, as though to receive the love of
+which her radiance was an emanation. And then, at a sound in the
+kitchen, she snatched my exaltation from me by suddenly turning dull.
+
+"I think that's Mr. Grey come in from his gardening. You'll excuse me."
+
+Through the open door I heard a voice saying in a way which suggested
+that its production involved much agitation of a prominent Adam's apple:
+
+"Well, dear, seeing you had a friend, I thought I'd better slip up and
+change my gardening trousers." I do not know what she said to him, but
+her voice was soft and comforting and occasionally girlish and
+interrupted by laughter, and I perceived from its sound that with
+characteristic gravity she had accepted it as her mission to keep
+loveliness and excitement alive in his life.
+
+"An old friend of mine has been wounded," was the only phrase I heard;
+but when she drew him out into the garden under the window she had
+evidently explained the situation away, for he listened docilely as she
+said: "I've made some rock-cakes for your tea. And if I'm late for
+supper, there's a dish of macaroni cheese you must put in the oven and a
+tin of tomatoes to eat with it. And there is a little rhubarb and
+shape." She told them off on her fingers, and then whisked him round and
+buckled the wagging straps at the back of his waistcoat. He was a lank
+man, with curly gray hairs growing from every place where it is
+inadvisable that hairs should grow,--from the inside of his ears, from
+his nostrils, on the back of his hands,--but he looked pleased when she
+touched him, and he said in a devoted way:
+
+"Very well, dear. Don't worry about me. I'll trot along after tea and
+have a game of draughts with Brown."
+
+She answered:
+
+"Yes, dear. And now get on with those cabbages. You're going to keep me
+in lovely cabbages, just as you did last year, won't you, darling?" She
+linked arms with him and took him back to his digging.
+
+When she came back into the parlor again she was wearing that yellowish
+raincoat, that hat with hearse plumes nodding over its sticky straw,
+that gray alpaca skirt. I first defensively clenched my hands. It would
+have been such agony to the finger-tips to touch any part of her
+apparel. And then I thought of Chris, to whom a second before I had
+hoped to bring a serene comforter. I perceived clearly that that
+ecstatic woman lifting her eyes and her hands to the benediction of love
+was Margaret as she existed in eternity; but this was Margaret as she
+existed in time, as the fifteen years between Monkey Island and this
+damp day in Ladysmith Road had irreparably made her. Well, I had
+promised to bring her to him.
+
+She said:
+
+"I'm ready," and against that simple view of her condition I had no
+argument. But when she paused by the painted drainpipe in the hall and
+peered under contracted brows for that unveracious tortoiseshell handle,
+I said hastily:
+
+"Oh, don't trouble about an umbrella."
+
+"I'll maybe need it walking home," she pondered.
+
+"But the car will bring you back."
+
+"Oh, that will be lovely," she said, and laughed nervously, looking very
+plain. "Do you know, I know the way we're coming together is terrible,
+but I can't think of a meeting with Chris as anything but a kind of
+treat. I've got a sort of party feeling now."
+
+As she held the gate open for me she looked back at the house.
+
+"It's a horrid little house, isn't it?" she asked. She evidently desired
+sanction for a long-suppressed discontent.
+
+"It isn't very nice," I agreed.
+
+"They put cows sometimes into the field at the back," she went on, as if
+conscientiously counting her blessings. "I like that; but otherwise it
+isn't much."
+
+"But it's got a very pretty name," I said, laying my hand on the raised
+metal letters that spelled "Mariposa" across the gate.
+
+"Ah, isn't it!" she exclaimed, with the smile of the inveterate
+romanticist. "It's Spanish, you know, for butterfly."
+
+Once we were in the automobile, she became a little sullen with shyness,
+because she felt herself so big and clumsy, her clothes so coarse,
+against the fine upholstery, the silver vase of Christmas roses, and all
+the deliberate delicacy of Kitty's car. She was afraid of the chauffeur,
+as the poor are always afraid of men-servants, and ducked her head when
+he got out to start the car. To recall her to ease and beauty I told her
+that though Chris had told me all about their meeting, he knew nothing
+of their parting, and that I wished very much to hear what had happened.
+
+In a deep, embarrassed voice she began to tell me about Monkey Island.
+It was strange how both Chris and she spoke of it as though it were not
+a place, but a magic state which largely explained the actions performed
+in it. Strange, too, that both of them should describe meticulously the
+one white hawthorn that stood among the poplars by the ferry-side. I
+suppose a thing that one has looked at with some one one loves acquires
+forever after a special significance. She said that her father had gone
+there when she was fourteen. After Mrs. Arlington had been taken away by
+a swift and painful death the cheer of his Windsor hostelry had become
+intolerable to the man; he regarded the whole world as her grave, and
+the tipsy sergeants in scarlet, the carter crying for a pint of
+four-half, and even the mares dipping their mild noses to the trough in
+the courtyard seemed to be defiling it by their happy, simple appetites.
+So they went to Monkey Island, the utter difference of which was a
+healing, and settled down happily in its green silence. All the summer
+was lovely; quiet, kind people, schoolmasters who fished, men who wrote
+books, married couples who still loved solitude, used to come and stay
+in the bright little inn. And all the winter was lovely, too; her
+temperament could see an adventure in taking up the carpets because the
+Thames was coming into the coffee-room. That was the tale of her life
+for four years. With her head on one side, and the air of judging this
+question by the light of experience, she pronounced that she had then
+been happy.
+
+Then one April afternoon Chris landed at the island, and by the first
+clean, quick movement of tying up his boat made her his slave. I could
+imagine that it would be so. He was wonderful when he was young; he
+possessed in great measure the loveliness of young men, which is like
+the loveliness of the spry foal or the sapling, but in him it was vexed
+into a serious and moving beauty by the inhabiting soul. When the
+sunlight lay on him, disclosing the gold hairs on his brown head, or
+when he was subject to any other physical pleasure, there was always
+reserve in his response to it. From his eyes, which, though gray, were
+somehow dark with speculation, one perceived that he was distracted by
+participation in some spiritual drama. To see him was to desire intimacy
+with him, so that one might intervene between this body, which was
+formed for happiness, and this soul, which cherished so deep a faith in
+tragedy. Well, she gave Chris ducks' eggs for tea. "No one ever had
+ducks' eggs like father did. It was his way of feeding them. It didn't
+pay, of course, but they were good." Before the afternoon was out he
+had snared them all with the silken net of his fine manners; he had
+talked to father about his poultry and had walked about the runs and
+shown an intelligent interest, and then, as on many succeeding days, he
+had laid his charm at the girl's feet. "But I thought he must be some
+one royal, and when he kept on coming, I thought it must be for the
+ducks' eggs." Then her damp, dull skin flushed suddenly to a warm glory,
+and she began to stammer.
+
+"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 courtship 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?"
+
+"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 came 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.
+
+So Kitty lay about like a broken doll, face downward on a sofa, with one
+limp arm dangling to the floor, or protruding stiff feet in fantastic
+slippers from the end of her curtained bed; and I tried to make my
+permanent wear that mood which had mitigated the end of my journey with
+Margaret--a mood of intense perception in which my strained mind settled
+on every vivid object that came under my eyes and tried to identify
+myself with its brightness and its lack of human passion. This does not
+mean that I passed my day in a state of joyous appreciation; it means
+that many times in the lanes of Harrowweald I have stood for long
+looking up at a fine tracery of bare boughs against the hard, high
+spring sky while the cold wind rushed through my skirts and chilled me
+to the bone, because I was afraid that when I moved my body and my
+attention I might begin to think. Indeed, grief is not the clear
+melancholy the young believe it. It is like a siege in a tropical city.
+The skin dries and the throat parches as though one were living in the
+heat of the desert; water and wine taste warm in the mouth, and food is
+of the substance of the sand; one snarls at one's company; thoughts
+prick one through sleep like mosquitos.
+
+A week after my journey to Wealdstone I went to Kitty to ask her to come
+for a walk with me and found her stretched on her pillows, holding a
+review of her underclothing. She refused bitterly and added:
+
+"Be back early. Remember Dr. Gilbert Anderson is coming at half-past
+four. He's our last hope. And tell that woman she must see him. He says
+he wants to see everybody concerned." She continued to look wanly at the
+frail, luminous silks her maid brought her as a speculator who had
+cornered an article for which there had been no demand might look at his
+damnably numerous, damnably unprofitable freights. So I went out alone
+into a soft day, with the dispelled winter lurking above in high dark
+clouds, under which there ran quick, fresh currents of air and broken
+shafts of insistent sunshine that spread a gray clarity of light in
+which every color showed sharp and strong. On the breast that
+Harrowweald turns to the south they had set a lambing-yard. The
+pale-lavender hurdles and gold-strewn straw were new gay notes on the
+opaque winter green of the slope, and the apprehensive bleatings of the
+ewes wound about the hill like a river of sound as they were driven up a
+lane hidden by the hedge. The lines of bare elms darkening the plains
+below made it seem as though the tide of winter had fallen and left this
+bare and sparkling in the spring. I liked it so much that I opened the
+gate and went and sat down on a tree which had been torn up by the roots
+in the great gale last year, but had not yet resigned itself to death,
+and was bravely decking its boughs with purple elm-flowers.
+
+That pleased me, too, and I wished I had some one with me to enjoy this
+artless little show of the new year. I had not really wanted Kitty; the
+companions I needed were Chris and Margaret. Chris would have talked, as
+he loved to do when he looked at leisure on a broad valley, about ideas
+which he had to exclude from his ordinary hours lest they should break
+the power of business over his mind, and Margaret would have gravely
+watched the argument from the shadow of her broad hat to see that it
+kept true, like a housewife watching a saucepan of milk lest it should
+boil over. They were naturally my friends, these gentle, speculative
+people.
+
+Then suddenly I was stunned with jealousy. It was not their love for
+each other that caused me such agony at that moment; it was the thought
+of the things their eyes had rested upon together. I imagined that white
+hawthorn among the poplars by the ferry on which they had looked fifteen
+years ago at Monkey Island, and it was more than I could bear. I
+thought how even now they might be exclaiming at the green smoke of the
+first buds on the brown undergrowth by the pond, and at that I slid off
+the tree-trunk and began walking very quickly down the hill. The red
+cows drank from the pond cupped by the willow-roots; a raw-boned
+stallion danced clumsily because warmth was running through the ground.
+I found a stream in the fields and followed it till it became a shining
+dike embanked with glowing green and gold mosses in the midst of woods;
+and the sight of those things was no sort of joy, because my vision was
+solitary. I wanted to end my desperation by leaping from a height, and I
+climbed on a knoll and flung myself face downward on the dead leaves
+below.
+
+I was now utterly cut off from Chris. Before, when I looked at him, I
+knew an instant ease in the sight of the short golden down on his
+cheeks, the ridge of bronze flesh above his thick, fair eyebrows. But
+now I was too busy reassuring him by showing a steady, undistorted
+profile crowned by a neat, proud sweep of hair instead of the
+tear-darkened mask he always feared ever to have enough vitality left
+over to enjoy his presence. I spoke in a calm voice full from the chest,
+quite unfluted with agony; I read "Country Life" with ponderous
+interest; I kept my hands, which I desired to wring, in doeskin gloves
+for most of the day; I played with the dogs a great deal and wore my
+thickest tweeds; I pretended that the slight heaviness of my features is
+a correct indication of my temperament. The only occasion when I could
+safely let the sense of him saturate me as it used was when I met
+Margaret in the hall as she came or went. She was very different now;
+she had a little smile in her eyes, as though she were listening to a
+familiar air played far away. Her awkwardness seemed indecision as to
+whether she should walk or dance to that distant music; her shabbiness
+was no more repulsive than the untidiness of a child who had been so
+eager to get to the party that it has not let its nurse finish fastening
+its frock. Always she extended a hand in an unbuttoned black thread
+glove and said, "It's another fine day again," or diffidently, as Kitty
+continued to withhold her presence, "I hope Mrs. Baldry is keeping
+well." Then, as our hands touched, he was with us, invoked by our common
+adoration. I felt his rough male texture and saw the clear warmth of his
+brown and gold coloring; I thought of him with the passion of exile. To
+Margaret it was a call, and she moved past me to the garden, holding her
+hands in front of her as though she bore invisible gifts, and pausing on
+the step of the French window to smile to herself, as if in her heart
+she turned over the precious thought: "He is here. This garden holds
+him." My moment, my small sole subsistence, ended in a feeling of
+jealousy as ugly and unmental as sickness. This was the saddest spring.
+
+Nothing could mitigate the harshness of our dejection. You may think we
+were attaching an altogether fictitious importance to what was merely
+the delusion of a madman. But every minute of the day, particularly at
+those trying times when he strolled about the house and grounds with the
+doctors, smiling courteously, but without joy, and answering their
+questions with the crisp politeness of a man shaking off an inquisitive
+commercial traveler in a hotel smoking-room, it became plain that if
+madness means a liability to wild error about the world Chris was not
+mad. It was our peculiar shame that he had rejected us when he had
+attained to something saner than sanity. His very loss of memory was a
+triumph over the limitations of language which prevent the mass of men
+from making explicit statements about their spiritual relationships. If
+he had said to Kitty and me, "I do not know you," we would have gaped;
+if he had expanded his meaning and said, "You are nothing to me; my
+heart is separate from your hearts," we would have wept at an unkindness
+he had not intended. But by the blankness of those eyes which saw me
+only as a disregarded playmate and Kitty not at all save as a stranger
+who had somehow become a decorative presence in his home and the orderer
+of his meals he let us know completely where we were. Even though I lay
+weeping at it on the dead leaves I was sensible of the bitter rapture
+which attends the discovery of any truth. I felt, indeed, a cold
+intellectual pride in his refusal to remember his prosperous maturity
+and his determined dwelling in the time of his first love, for it showed
+him so much saner than the rest of us, who take life as it comes, loaded
+with the unessential and the irritating. I was even willing to admit
+that this choice of what was to him reality out of all the appearances
+so copiously presented by the world, this adroit recovery of the dropped
+pearl of beauty, was the act of genius I had always expected from him.
+But that did not make less agonizing this exclusion from his life.
+
+I could not think clearly about it. I suppose that the subject of our
+tragedy, written in spiritual terms, was that in Kitty he had turned
+from the type of woman that makes the body conqueror of the soul and in
+me the type that mediates between the soul and the body and makes them
+run even and unhasty like a well-matched pair of carriage horses, and
+had given himself to a woman whose bleak habit it was to champion the
+soul against the body. But I saw it just as a fantastic act of cruelty
+that I could think of only as a conjunction of calamitous images. I
+think of it happening somewhere behind the front, at the end of a
+straight road that runs by a line of ragged poplars between mud flats
+made steel-bright with floods pitted by the soft, slow rain. There, past
+a church that lacks its tower, stand a score of houses, each hideous
+with patches of bare bricks that show like sores through the ripped-off
+plaster and uncovered rafters that stick out like broken bones. There
+are people still living here. A slouchy woman sits at the door of a
+filthy cottage, counting some dirty linen and waving her bare arm at
+some passing soldiers. And at another house there is a general store
+with strings of orange onions and bunches of herbs hanging from the
+roof, a brown gloom rich with garlic and humming with the flies that
+live all the year round in French village shops, a black cat rubbing her
+sleepiness against the lintel. It is in there that Chris is standing,
+facing across the counter an old man in a blouse, with a scar running
+white into the gray thickets of his beard, an old man with a smile at
+once lewd and benevolent, repulsive with dirt and yet magnificent by
+reason of the Olympian structure of his body. I think he is the soul of
+the universe, equally cognizant and disregardful of every living thing,
+to whom I am not more dear than the bare-armed slouchy woman at the
+neighboring door. And Chris is leaning on the counter, his eyes glazed.
+(This is his spirit; his body lies out there in the drizzle, at the
+other end of the road.) He is looking down on the two crystal balls that
+the old man's foul, strong hands have rolled across to him. In one he
+sees Margaret, not in her raincoat and her nodding plumes, but as she is
+transfigured in the light of eternity. Long he looks there; then drops a
+glance to the other, just long enough to see that in its depths Kitty
+and I walk in bright dresses through our glowing gardens. We had
+suffered no transfiguration, for we are as we are, and there is nothing
+more to us. The whole truth about us lies in our material seeming. He
+sighs a deep sigh of delight and puts out his hand to the ball where
+Margaret shines. His sleeve catches the other one and sends it down to
+crash in a thousand pieces on the floor. The old man's smile continues
+to be lewd and benevolent; he is still not more interested in me than in
+the bare-armed woman. Chris is wholly inclosed in his intentness on his
+chosen crystal. No one weeps for this shattering of our world.
+
+I stirred on the dead leaves as though I had really heard the breaking
+of the globe and cried out, "Gilbert Anderson, Gilbert Anderson must
+cure him." Heaven knows that I had no reason for faith in any doctor,
+for during the last week so many of them, as sleek as seals with their
+neatly brushed hair and their frock-coats, had stood round Chris and
+looked at him with the consequenceless deliberation of a plumber. Their
+most successful enterprise had been his futile hypnotism. He had
+submitted to it as a good-natured man submits to being blindfolded at a
+children's party, and under its influence had recovered his memory and
+his middle-aged personality, had talked of Kitty with the humorous
+tenderness of the English husband, and had looked possessively about
+him. But as his mind came out of the control he exposed their lie that
+they were dealing with a mere breakdown of the normal process by pushing
+away this knowledge and turning to them the blank wall, all the blanker
+because it was unconscious, of his resolution not to know. I had
+accepted that it would always be so. But at that moment I had so great a
+need to throw off my mood of despair, so insupportably loaded with all
+the fantastic images to which my fevered mind transmuted the facts of
+our tragedy, that I filled myself with a gasping, urgent faith in this
+new doctor. I jumped up and pushed through the brambles to the hedge
+that divided the preserves in which I was trespassing from our own
+woods, breathless because I had let it go past four and I had still to
+find Chris and Margaret for the doctor's visit at the half-hour.
+
+There had been a hardening of the light while I slept that made the
+dear, familiar woods rich and sinister, and to the eye, tropical. The
+jewel-bright buds on the soot-black boughs, the blue valley distances,
+smudged here and there with the pink enamel of villa-roofs, and seen
+between the black-and-white intricacies of the birch-trunks and the
+luminous gray pillars of the beeches, hurt my wet eyes as might beauty
+blazing under an equatorial sun. There was a tropical sense of danger,
+too, for I walked as apprehensively as though a snake coiled under every
+leaf, because I feared to come on them when he was speaking to her
+without looking at her or thinking in silence while he played with her
+hand. Embraces do not matter; they merely indicate the will to love, and
+may as well be followed by defeat as victory. But disregard means that
+now there needs to be no straining of the eyes, no stretching forth of
+the hands, no pressing of the lips, because theirs is such a union that
+they are no longer aware of the division of their flesh. I know it must
+be so; a lonely life gives one opportunities of thinking these things
+out. I could not have borne to see signs of how he had achieved this
+intimacy with the woman whom a sudden widening of the downward vista
+showed as she leaned her bent back, ridged by her cheap stays, against a
+birch that some special skill of our forester had made wonderful for its
+straight slenderness. Against the clear colors of the bright bare wood
+her yellow raincoat made a muddy patch, and as a dead bough dropped near
+her she made a squalid dodging movement like a hen. She was not so much
+a person as an implication of dreary poverty, like an open door in a
+mean house that lets out the smell of cooking cabbage and the screams of
+children. Doubtlessly he sat somewhere close to her, lumpishly content.
+I thought distractedly how necessary it was that Gilbert Anderson should
+cure him, and tried to shout to her, but found my throat full of sobs.
+So I broke my way down through the fern and bramble and stood level with
+them, though still divided by some yards of broken ground.
+
+It was not utter dullness not to have anticipated the beauty that I saw.
+No one could have told. They had taken the mackintosh rug out of the
+dinghy and spread it on this little space of clear grass, I think so
+that they could look at a scattering of early primroses in a pool of
+white anemones at an oak-tree's foot. She had run her hands over the rug
+so that it lay quite smooth and comfortable under him when at last he
+felt drowsy and turned on his side to sleep. He lay there in the
+confiding relaxation of a sleeping child, his hands unclenched, and his
+head thrown back so that the bare throat showed defenselessly. Now he
+was asleep and his face undarkened by thought, one saw how very fair he
+really was. And she, her mournfully vigilant face pinkened by the cold
+river of air sent by the advancing evening through the screen of
+rusted-gold bracken behind her, was sitting by him, just watching.
+
+I have often seen people grouped like that on the common outside our
+gates on Bank holidays. Most often the man has a handkerchief over his
+face to shade him from the sun, and the woman squats beside him and
+peers through the undergrowth to see that the children come to no harm
+as they play. It has sometimes seemed to me that there was a
+significance about it. You know when one goes into the damp, odorous
+coolness of a church in a Catholic country and sees the kneeling
+worshipers, their bodies bent stiffly and reluctantly, and yet with
+abandonment as though to represent the inevitable bending of the will to
+a purpose outside the individual person, or when under any sky one sees
+a mother with her child in her arms, something turns in one's heart like
+a sword, and one says to oneself, "If humanity forgets these attitudes
+there is an end to the world." But people like me, who are not artists,
+are never sure about people they don't know. So it was not until now,
+when it happened to my friends, when it was my dear Chris and my dear
+Margaret who sat thus englobed in peace as in a crystal sphere, that I
+knew it was the most significant, as it was the loveliest, attitude in
+the world. It means that the woman has gathered the soul of the man into
+her soul and is keeping it warm in love and peace so that his body can
+rest quiet for a little time. That is a great thing for a woman to do. I
+know there are things at least as great for those women whose
+independent spirits can ride fearlessly and with interest outside the
+home park of their personal relationships, but independence is not the
+occupation of most of us. What we desire is greatness such as this,
+which had given sleep to the beloved. I had known that he was having bad
+nights at Baldry Court in that new room with the jade-green painted
+walls and the lapis-lazuli fireplace, which he found with surprise to be
+his instead of the remembered little room with the fishing-rods; but I
+had not been able to do anything about it.
+
+It was not fair that by the exercise of a generosity which seemed as
+fortuitous a possession as a beautiful voice a woman should be able to
+do such wonderful things for a man. For sleep was the least of her gifts
+to him. What she had done in leading him into the quiet magic circle
+out of our life, out of the splendid house which was not so much a house
+as a vast piece of space partitioned off from the universe and decorated
+partly for beauty and partly to make our privacy more insolent, out of
+the garden where the flowers took thought as to how they should grow and
+the wood made as formal as a pillared aisle by forestry, may be judged
+from my anguish in being left there alone. Indeed she had been generous
+to us all, for at her touch our lives had at last fallen into a pattern;
+she was the sober thread the interweaving of which with our scattered
+magnificences had somewhat achieved the design that otherwise would not
+appear. Perhaps even her dinginess was part of her generosity, for in
+order to fit into the pattern one has sometimes to forego something of
+one's individual beauty. That is why women like us do not wear such
+obviously lovely dresses as cocottes, but clothe ourselves in garments
+that by their slight neglect of the possibilities of beauty declare that
+there are such things as thrift and restraint and care for the future.
+And so I could believe of Margaret that her determined dwelling in
+places where there was not enough of anything, her continued exposure of
+herself to the grime of squalid living, was unconsciously deliberate.
+The deep internal thing that had guided Chris to forgetfulness had
+guided her to poverty, so that when the time came for her meeting with
+her lover there should be not one intimation of the beauty of suave
+flesh to distract him from the message of her soul. I looked upward at
+this supreme act of sacrifice and glowed at her private gift to me. My
+sleep, though short, was now dreamless. No more did I see his body
+rotting into union with that brown texture of corruption which is
+No-Man's-Land; no more did I see him slipping softly down the parapet
+into the trench; no more did I hear voices talking in a void: "Help me,
+old man; I've got no legs--" "I can't, old man; I've got no hands." They
+could not take him back to the army as he was. Only that morning as I
+went through the library he had raised an appalled face from the pages
+of a history of the war.
+
+"Jenny, it can't be true that they did that to Belgium? Those funny,
+quiet, stingy people!" And his soldierly knowledge was as deeply buried
+as this memory of that awful August. While her spell endured they could
+not send him back into the hell of war. This wonderful, kind woman held
+his body as safely as she held his soul.
+
+I was so grateful that I was forced to go and sit down on the rug beside
+her. It was an intrusion, but I wanted to be near her. She did not look
+surprised when she turned to me her puckered brows, but smiled through
+the ugly fringe of vagrant hairs the weather had plucked from under the
+hard rim of her hat. It was part of her loveliness that even if she did
+not understand an act she could accept it.
+
+Presently she leaned over to me across his body and whispered:
+
+"He's not cold. I put the overcoat on him as soon as he was fairly off.
+I've just felt his hands, and they're as warm as toast." If I had
+whispered like that I would have wakened him.
+
+Soon he stirred, groped for her hand, and lay with his cheek against the
+rough palm. He was awake, but liked to lie so.
+
+In a little she shook her hand away and said:
+
+"Get up and run along to the house and have some hot tea. You'll catch
+your death lying out here."
+
+He caught her hand again. It was evident that for some reason the moment
+was charged with ecstasy for them both.
+
+It seemed as though there was a softer air in this small clearing than
+anywhere else in the world. I stood up, with my back against a birch and
+said negligently, knowing now that nothing could really threaten them:
+
+"There is a doctor coming at half-past four who wants to see you both."
+
+It cast no shadow on their serenity. He smiled upward, still lying on
+his back, and hailed me, "Hallo, Jenny." But she made him get up and
+help her to fold the rug.
+
+"It's not right to keep a doctor waiting in these times," she declared,
+"so overworked they are, poor men, since the war." As I led the way up
+through the woods to the house I heard her prove her point by an
+illustrative anecdote about something that had happened down her road. I
+heard, too, their footsteps come to a halt for a space. I think her gray
+eyes had looked at him so sweetly that he had been constrained to take
+her in his arms.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+I felt, I remember with the little perk of self-approbation with which
+one remembers any sort of accurate premonition even if its fulfilment
+means disaster, a cold hand close round my heart as we turned the corner
+of the house and came on Dr. Gilbert Anderson. I was startled, to begin
+with, by his unmedical appearance. He was a little man with winking blue
+eyes, a flushed and crumpled forehead, a little gray mustache that gave
+him the profile of an amiable cat, and a lively taste in spotted ties,
+and he lacked that appetiteless look which is affected by distinguished
+practitioners. He was at once more comical and more suggestive of power
+than any other doctor I had ever seen, and this difference was
+emphasized by his unexpected occupation. A tennis-ball which he had
+discovered somewhere had roused his sporting instincts, and he was
+trying at what range it was possible to kick it between two large stones
+which he had placed close together in front of the steps up to the
+house. It was his chubby absorption in this amusement which accounted
+for his first moment of embarrassment.
+
+"Nobody about in there; we professional men get so little fresh air," he
+said bluffly, and blew his nose in a very large handkerchief, from the
+folds of which he emerged with perfect self-possession. "You," he said
+to Chris, with a naive adoption of the detective tone, "are the
+patient." He rolled his blue eye on me, took a good look, and, as he
+realized I did not matter, shook off the unnecessary impression like a
+dog coming out of water. He faced Margaret as though she were the nurse
+in charge of the case and gave her a brisk little nod. "You're Mrs.
+Grey. I shall want to talk to you later. Meantime--this man. I'll come
+back." He indicated by a windmill gesture that we should go into the
+house, and swung off with Chris.
+
+She obeyed; that sort of woman always does what the doctor orders. But I
+delayed for a moment to stare after this singular specialist, to
+sidetrack my foreboding by pronouncing him a bounder, to wish, as my
+foreboding persisted, that like a servant I could give notice because
+there was "always something happening in the house."
+
+Then, as the obedient figure at the top of the stairs was plainly
+shivering under its shoddy clothes in the rising wind that was polishing
+the end of the afternoon to brightness, I hastened to lead her into the
+hall. We stood about uneasily in its gloaming. Margaret looked round her
+and said in a voice flattened by the despondency she evidently shared
+with me: "It is nice to have everything ready that people can want and
+everything in its place. I used to do it at Monkey Island Inn. It was
+not grand like this, of course, but our visitors always came back a
+second time." Abstractedly and yet with joy she fingered the fine work
+of the table-leg.
+
+There was a noise above us like the fluttering of doves. Kitty was
+coming downstairs in a white serge dress against which her hands were
+rosy; a woman with such lovely little hands never needed to wear
+flowers. By her kind of physical discipline she had reduced her grief to
+no more than a slight darkening under the eyes, and for this moment she
+was glowing. I knew it was because she was going to meet a new man and
+anticipated the kindling of admiration in his eyes, and I smiled,
+contrasting her probable prefiguring of Dr. Anderson with the amiable
+rotundity we had just encountered. Not that it would have made any
+difference if she had seen him. Beautiful women of her type lose, in
+this matter of admiration alone, their otherwise tremendous sense of
+class distinction; they are obscurely aware that it is their civilizing
+mission to flash the jewel of their beauty before all men, so that they
+shall desire it and work to 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 brainwork.
+
+"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 arm-chair 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 suggests that flattery is not part of my daily
+diet. "You, Miss Baldry, you've known him longest."
+
+"Nothing and everything was wrong," I said at last. "I've always felt
+it." A sharp movement of Kitty's body confirmed my deep, old suspicion
+that she hated me.
+
+He went back further than I expected.
+
+"His relations with his father and mother, now?"
+
+"His father was old when he was born, and always was a little jealous of
+him. His mother was not his sort. She wanted a stupid son who would have
+been satisfied with shooting."
+
+He laid down a remark very softly, like a hunter setting a snare.
+
+"He turned, then, to sex with a peculiar need."
+
+It was Margaret who spoke, shuffling her feet awkwardly under her
+chair.
+
+"Yes, he was always dependent."
+
+We gaped at her who said this of our splendid Chris, and I saw that she
+was not as she had been. There was a directness of speech, a straight
+stare, that was for her a frenzy. "Doctor," she said, her mild voice
+roughened, "what's the use of talking? You can't cure him,"--she caught
+her lower lip with her teeth and fought back from the brink of
+tears,--"make him happy, I mean. All you can do is to make him
+ordinary."
+
+"I grant you that's all I do," he said. It queerly seemed as though he
+was experiencing the relief one feels on meeting an intellectual equal.
+"It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of
+the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it's the
+place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don't see the urgency myself."
+
+She continued without joy:
+
+"I know how you could bring him back--a memory so strong that it would
+recall everything else in spite of his discontent."
+
+The little man had lost in a moment his glib assurance, his knowingness
+about the pathways of the soul.
+
+"Well, I'm willing to learn."
+
+"Remind him of the boy," said Margaret.
+
+The doctor ceased suddenly to balance on the balls of his feet.
+
+"What boy?"
+
+"They had a boy."
+
+He looked at Kitty.
+
+"You told me nothing of this!"
+
+"I didn't think it mattered," she answered, and shivered and looked
+cold, as she always did at the memory of her unique contact with death.
+"He died five years ago."
+
+He dropped his head back, stared at the cornice, and said with the soft
+malignity of a clever person dealing with the slow-witted.
+
+"These subtle discontents are often the most difficult to deal with."
+Sharply he turned to Margaret. "How would you remind him?"
+
+"Take him something the boy wore, some toy he played with."
+
+Their eyes met wisely.
+
+"It would have to be you that did it."
+
+Her face assented.
+
+Kitty said:
+
+"I don't understand. How does it matter so much?" She repeated it twice
+before she broke the silence that Margaret's wisdom had brought down on
+us. Then Dr. Anderson, rattling the keys in his trousers-pockets and
+swelling red and perturbed, answered:
+
+"I don't know, but it does."
+
+Kitty's voice soared in satisfaction.
+
+"Oh, then it's very simple. Mrs. Grey can do it now. Jenny, take Mrs.
+Grey up to the nursery. There are lots of things up there."
+
+Margaret made no movement, but continued to sit with her heavy boots
+resting on the edge of their soles. Dr. Anderson searched Kitty's face,
+exclaimed, "Oh, well!" and flung himself into an arm-chair so suddenly
+that the springs spoke. Margaret smiled at that and turned to me, "Yes,
+take me to the nursery, please." Yet as I walked beside her up the
+stairs I knew this compliance was not the indication of any melting of
+this new steely sternness. The very breathing that I heard as I knelt
+beside her at the nursery door and eased the disused lock seemed to come
+from a different and a harsher body than had been hers before. I did not
+wonder that she was feeling bleak, since in a few moments she was to go
+out and say the words that would end all her happiness, that would
+destroy all the gifts her generosity had so difficultly amassed. Well,
+that is the kind of thing one has to do in this life.
+
+But hardly had the door opened and disclosed the empty, sunny spaces
+swimming with motes before her old sweetness flowered again. She moved
+forward slowly, tremulous and responsive and pleased, as though the
+room's loveliness was a gift to her. She stretched out her hands to the
+clear sapphire walls and the bright fresco of birds and animals with a
+young delight. So, I thought, might a bride go about the house her
+husband secretly prepared for her. Yet when she reached the hearth and
+stood with her hands behind her on the fireguard, looking about her at
+all the exquisite devices of our nursery to rivet health and amusement
+on our reluctant little visitor, it was so apparent that she was a
+mother that I could not imagine how it was that I had not always known
+it. It has sometimes happened that painters who have kept close enough
+to earth to see a heavenly vision have made pictures of the assumption
+of the Blessed Virgin which do indeed show women who could bring God
+into the world by the passion of their motherhood. "Let there be life,"
+their suspended bodies seem to cry out to the universe about them, and
+the very clouds under their feet change into cherubim. As Margaret stood
+there, her hands pressed palm to palm beneath her chin and a blind smile
+on her face, she looked even so.
+
+"Oh, the fine room!" she cried. "But where's his little cot?"
+
+"It isn't here. This is the day nursery. The night nursery we didn't
+keep. It is just bedroom now."
+
+Her eyes shone at the thought of the cockered childhood this had been.
+
+"I couldn't afford to have two nurseries. It makes all the difference to
+the wee things." She hung above me for a little as I opened the ottoman
+and rummaged among Oliver's clothes. "Ah, the lovely little frocks! Did
+she make them? Ah, well, she'd hardly have the time, with this great
+house to see to. But I don't care much for baby frocks. The babies
+themselves are none the happier for them. It's all show." She went over
+to the rocking-horse and gave a ghostly child a ride. For long she
+hummed a tuneless song into the sunshine and retreated far away into
+some maternal dream. "He was too young for this," she said. "His daddy
+must have given him it. I knew it. Men always give them presents above
+their age, they're in such a hurry for them to grow up. We like them to
+take their time, the loves. But where's his engine? Didn't he love
+puffer-trains? Of course he never saw them. You're so far from the
+railway station. What a pity! He'd have loved them so. Dick was so happy
+when I stopped his pram on the railway-bridge on my way back from the
+shops, and he could sit up and see the puffers going by." Her distress
+that Oliver had missed this humble pleasure darkened her for a minute.
+"Why did he die! You didn't overtax his brain? He wasn't taught his
+letters too soon?"
+
+"Oh, no," I said. I couldn't find the clothes I wanted. "The only thing
+that taxed his little brain was the prayers his Scotch nurse taught him,
+and he didn't bother much over them. He would say, 'Jesus, tender
+leopard,' instead of 'Jesus, tender shepherd,' as if he liked it
+better."
+
+"Did you ever! The things they say! He'd a Scotch nurse. They say
+they're very good. I've read in the papers the Queen of Spain has one."
+She had gone back to the hearth again, and was playing with the toys on
+the mantelpiece. It was odd that she showed no interest in my search for
+the most memorable garment. A vivacity which played above her tear-wet
+strength, like a ball of St. Elmo's fire on the mast of a stout ship,
+made me realize she still was strange. "The toys he had! His nurse
+didn't let him have them all at once. She held him up and said, 'Baby,
+you must choose!' and he said, 'Teddy, please, Nanny,' and wagged his
+head at every word."
+
+I had laid my hand on them at last. I wished, in the strangest way, that
+I had not. Yet of course it had to be.
+
+"That's just what he did do," I said.
+
+As she felt the fine kid-skin of the clockwork dog, her face began to
+twitch.
+
+"I thought perhaps my baby had left me because I had so little to give
+him. But if a baby could leave all this!" She cried flatly, as though
+constant repetition in the night had made it as instinctive a reaction
+to suffering as a moan, "I want a child! I want a child!" Her arms
+invoked the wasted life that had been squandered in this room. "It's all
+gone so wrong," she fretted, and her voice dropped to a solemn whisper.
+"They each had only half a life."
+
+I had to steady her. She could not go to Chris and shock him not only by
+her news, but also by her agony. I rose and took her the things I had
+found in the ottoman and the toy cupboard.
+
+"I think these are the best things to take. This is one of the blue
+jerseys he used to wear. This is the red ball he and his father used to
+play with on the lawn."
+
+Her hard hunger for the child that was not melted into a tenderness for
+the child that had been. She looked broodingly at what I carried, then
+laid a kind hand on my arm.
+
+"You've chosen the very things he will remember. Oh, you poor girl!"
+
+I found that from her I could accept even pity.
+
+She nursed the jersey and the ball, changed them from arm to arm, and
+held them to her face.
+
+"I think I know the kind of boy he was--a man from the first." She
+kissed them, folded up the jersey, and neatly set the ball upon it on
+the ottoman, and regarded them with tears. "There, put them back. That's
+all I wanted them for. All I came up here for."
+
+I stared.
+
+"To get Chris's boy," she moaned. "You thought I meant to take them out
+to Chris?" She wrung her hands; her weak voice quavered at the sternness
+of her resolution. "How can I?"
+
+I grasped her hands.
+
+"Why should you bring him back?" I said. I might have known there was
+deliverance in her yet.
+
+Her slow mind gathered speed.
+
+"Either I never should have come," she pleaded, "or you should let him
+be." She was arguing not with me, but with the whole hostile, reasonable
+world. "Mind you, I wasn't sure if I ought to come the second time,
+seeing we both were married and that. I prayed and read the Bible, but
+I couldn't get any help. You don't notice how little there is in the
+Bible really till you go to it for help. But I've lived a hard life and
+I've always done my best for William, and I know nothing in the world
+matters so much as happiness. If anybody's happy, you ought to let them
+be. So I came again. Let him be. If you knew how happy he was just
+pottering round the garden. Men do love a garden. He could just go on.
+It can go on so easily." But there was a shade of doubt in her voice;
+she was pleading not only with me, but with fate. "You wouldn't let them
+take him away to the asylum. You wouldn't stop me coming. The other one
+might, but you'd see she didn't. Oh, do just let him be!
+
+"Put it like this." She made such explanatory gestures as I have seen
+cabmen make over their saucers of tea round a shelter. "If my boy had
+been a cripple,--he wasn't; he had the loveliest limbs,--and the
+doctors had said to me, 'We'll straighten your boy's legs for you, but
+he will be in pain all the rest of his life,' I'd not have let them
+touch him.
+
+"I seemed to have to tell them that I knew a way. I suppose it would
+have been sly to sit there and not tell them. I told them, anyhow. But,
+oh, I can't do it! Go out and put an end to the poor love's happiness.
+After the time he's had, the war and all. And then he'll have to go back
+there! I can't! I can't!"
+
+[Illustration: "I oughtn't to do it, ought I?"]
+
+I felt an ecstatic sense of ease. Everything was going to be right.
+Chris was to live in the interminable enjoyment of his youth and love.
+There was to be a finality about his happiness which usually belongs
+only to loss and calamity; he was to be as happy as a ring cast into the
+sea is lost, as a man whose coffin has lain for centuries beneath the
+sod is dead. Yet Margaret continued to say, and irritated me by the
+implication that the matter was not settled:
+
+"I oughtn't to do it, ought I?"
+
+"Of course not! Of course not!" I cried heartily, but the attention died
+in her eyes. She stared over my shoulder at the open door, where Kitty
+stood.
+
+The poise of her head had lost its pride, the shadows under her eyes
+were black like the marks of blows, and all her loveliness was diverted
+to the expression of grief. She held in her arms her Chinese sleeve dog,
+a once-prized pet that had fallen from favor and was now only to be met
+whining upward for a little love at every passer in the corridors, and
+it sprawled leaf-brown across her white frock, wriggling for joy at the
+unaccustomed embrace. That she should at last have stooped to lift the
+lonely little dog was a sign of her deep unhappiness. Why she had come
+up I do not know, nor why her face puckered with tears as she looked in
+on us. It was not that she had the slightest intimation of our decision,
+for she could not have conceived that we could follow any course but
+that which was obviously to her advantage. It was simply that she hated
+to see this strange, ugly woman moving about among her things. She
+swallowed her tears and passed on, to drift, like a dog, about the
+corridors.
+
+Now, why did Kitty, who was the falsest thing on earth, who was in tune
+with every kind of falsity, by merely suffering somehow remind us of
+reality? Why did her tears reveal to me what I had learned long ago, but
+had forgotten in my frenzied love, that there is a draft that we must
+drink or not be fully human? I knew that one must know the truth. I knew
+quite well that when one is adult one must raise to one's lips the wine
+of the truth, heedless that it is not sweet like milk, but draws the
+mouth with its strength, and celebrate communion with reality, or else
+walk forever queer and small like a dwarf. Thirst for this sacrament had
+made Chris strike away the cup of lies about life that Kitty's white
+hands held to him and turn to Margaret with this vast trustful gesture
+of his loss of memory. And helped by me, she had forgotten that it is
+the first concern of love to safeguard the dignity of the beloved, so
+that neither God in his skies nor the boy peering through the hedge
+should find in all time one possibility for contempt, and had handed him
+the trivial toy of happiness. We had been utterly negligent of his
+future, blasphemously careless of the divine essential of his soul. For
+if we left him in his magic circle there would come a time when his
+delusion turned to a senile idiocy; when his joy at the sight of
+Margaret disgusted the flesh because his smiling mouth was slack with
+age; when one's eyes no longer followed him caressingly as he went down
+to look for the first primroses in the wood, but flitted here and there
+defensively to see that nobody was noticing the doddering old man.
+Gamekeepers would chat kindly with him, and tap their foreheads as they
+passed through the copse; callers would be tactful and dangle bright
+talk before him. He who was as a flag flying from our tower would become
+a queer-shaped patch of eccentricity on the country-side, the
+full-mannered music of his being would become a witless piping in the
+bushes. He would not be quite a man.
+
+I did not know how I could pierce Margaret's simplicity with this last
+cruel subtlety, and turned to her, stammering. But she said:
+
+"Give me the jersey and the ball."
+
+The rebellion had gone from her eyes, and they were again the seat of
+all gentle wisdom.
+
+"The truth's the truth," she said, "and he must know it."
+
+I looked up at her, gasping, yet not truly amazed; for I had always
+known she could not leave her throne of righteousness for long, and she
+repeated, "The truth's the truth," smiling sadly at the strange order of
+this earth.
+
+We kissed not as women, but as lovers do; I think we each embraced that
+part of Chris the other had absorbed by her love. She took the jersey
+and the ball, and clasped them as though they were a child. When she got
+to the door she stopped and leaned against the lintel. Her head fell
+back; her eyes closed; her mouth was contorted as though she swallowed
+bitter drink.
+
+I lay face downward on the ottoman and presently heard her poor boots go
+creaking down the corridors. Through the feeling of doom that filled the
+room as tangibly as a scent I stretched out to the thought of Chris. In
+the deep daze of devotion which followed recollection of the fair down
+on his cheek, the skin burned brown to the rim of his gray eyes, the
+harsh and diffident masculinity of him, I found comfort in remembering
+that there was a physical gallantry about him which would still, even
+when the worst had happened, leap sometimes to the joy of life. Always,
+to the very end, when the sun shone on his face or his horse took his
+fences well, he would screw up his eyes and smile that little
+stiff-lipped smile. I nursed a feeble glow at that. "We must ride a
+lot," I planned. And then Kitty's heels tapped on the polished floor,
+and her skirts swished as she sat down in the arm-chair, and I was
+distressed by the sense, more tiresome than a flickering light, of some
+one fretting.
+
+She said:
+
+"I wish she would hurry up. She's got to do it sooner or later."
+
+My spirit was asleep in horror. Out there Margaret was breaking his
+heart and hers, using words like a hammer, looking wise, doing it so
+well.
+
+"Aren't they coming back?" asked Kitty. "I wish you'd look."
+
+There was nothing in the garden; only a column of birds swinging across
+the lake of green light that lay before the sunset.
+
+A long time after Kitty spoke once more:
+
+"Jenny, do look again."
+
+There had fallen a twilight which was a wistfulness of the earth. Under
+the cedar-boughs I dimly saw a figure mothering something in her arms.
+Almost had she dissolved into the shadows; in another moment the night
+would have her. With his back turned on this fading unhappiness Chris
+walked across the lawn. He was looking up under his brows at the
+over-arching house as though it were a hated place to which, against all
+his hopes, business had forced him to return. He stepped aside to avoid
+a patch of brightness cast by a lighted window on the grass; lights in
+our house were worse than darkness, affection worse than hate elsewhere.
+He wore a dreadful, decent smile; I knew how his voice would resolutely
+lift in greeting us. He walked not loose-limbed like a boy, as he had
+done that very afternoon, but with the soldier's hard tread upon the
+heel. It recalled to me that, bad as we were, we were yet not the worst
+circumstance of his return. When we had lifted the yoke of our embraces
+from his shoulders he would go back to that flooded trench in Flanders,
+under that sky more full of flying death than clouds, to that
+No-Man's-Land where bullets fall like rain on the rotting faces of the
+dead.
+
+"Jenny, aren't they there?" Kitty asked again.
+
+"They're both there."
+
+"Is he coming back?"
+
+"He's coming back."
+
+"Jenny! Jenny! How does he look?"
+
+"Oh,"--how could I say it?--"every inch a soldier."
+
+She crept behind me to the window, peered over my shoulder and saw.
+
+I heard her suck in her breath with satisfaction.
+
+"He's cured!" she whispered slowly. "He's cured!"
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Return of the Soldier, by Rebecca West
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