The Return of the Soldier

by Rebecca West

  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 drawingroom 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 searchlight 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 tomorrow. You shall see as much of her as you like.”

  His arms fell to his sides.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Kitty! Kitty! how can you!”

  But her little pink mouth went on manufacturing malice.

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

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

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

  Kitty shook herself neat and stood up.

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

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

  “You can’t remember her at all?”

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

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

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

  “Jenny, is this true?”

  “That Kitty’s been a good wife?”

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

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

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

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

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

  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 darkgreen, glassy waters of an unvisited backwater, 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.

  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 Thamesside 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 alderboughs 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.

  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 un- opened 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 push- ing 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 fig-wort 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 churchtower. 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.