by Rebecca West
The Return Of The Soldier
Rebecca West
1918
INTRODUCTION
Verlyn Klinkenborg
Rebecca West was always hard on Tolstoy. She accused him of writing the same book over and over—something she could never be accused of doing—and of being a preacher, rather than an artist. Late in her life, in a letter to a literary editor, she quoted a sentence of Tolstoy’s that she had once heard praised: “The little children went into the wood and looked for mushrooms, uttering little cries when they found them.” Her response? “Now, that’s an empty sentence, and a novel should have no empty sentences. I mean that seriously, because if there are empty sentences the reader falls into the same attention deeply stained by inattention which comes to congregations listening to preachers; and a novel is a matter of catching the attention to something new and important.”
New and important The Return of the Soldier certainly was when first published in 1918, and new and important it remains. It is the only significant novel about World War I written by a woman of the time, and it was written while the war’s end still looked very far off, though not as far off as the war’s beginning had begun to look. The Return of the Soldier contains not a single empty sentence—there is hardly room for one—and in fact the passion in this brief novel spills over the channels through which it is meant to run. The reader’s attention is never stained—a very important word to Rebecca West—by inattention.
And so a few simple facts. West was born Cicily Isabel Fairfield in London in late December 1892. When The Return of the Soldier was published, she was twenty-four years old but already a very experienced writer. Her first book, a critical study called Henry James, had appeared in 1916, and even by then she had to her name a corpus of pungent reviews and essays that had made, as one contemporary put it, “not so much a splash, as a hole in the world.” In 1913, when she was twenty, West became H. G. Wells’s lover and made the single most important mistake of her life, becoming pregnant with Wells’s child, a boy she named Anthony, who did his best in later years to make her miserable. In October 1917, when she learned that The Return of the Soldier—her first novel—had been accepted for publication, Anthony was already three, incendiary bombs and aerial torpedoes were falling all around her, and West had been reading Tolstoy.
“Twice have I read War and Peace,” she wrote to her friend Sylvia Lind, “and found nothing but stuffed Tolstoys, and such lots and lots of them. And plainly Anna Karenina was written simply to convince Tolstoy that there was nothing in this expensive and troublesome business of adultery….” It almost goes without saying that West, who had what she called “formidable emotions,” preferred Dostoevsky.
To a twenty-first-century reader, The Return of the Soldier has a deceptively serene surface. In our time we are tempted to believe that long sentences are necessarily languid or turgid and that a writer’s palette of colors should not be quite as pure and primary as West’s in this novel. When we come upon a sentence like “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,” we are likely to believe that it describes a picture of a place—a tepid landscape in a clumsy frame somewhere—rather than the place itself. And to us, who pretend to contemplate our emotions with such professional coolness, the language West uses for the inner longings of her characters seems extreme, what people in a book would say they feel rather than what humans themselves feel.
But the book is right and we are wrong. Its prose is unyielding in its force, a vivid if not yet completely mature demonstration of West’s often astonishing power. She is, in fact, one of the great prose writers of the twentieth century, whether she is writing novels or nonfiction. The England of this book is at once the old land that existed before World War I and a new place that has to be understood in terms of a new savagery. As for the emotions of these characters, they capture not only the intensity with which life is always lived in wartime but the intensity with which West herself lived. That intensity is no less fervent and the war no less tragic because it is shown from the home front and not from the trenches.
The Return of the Soldier is the most compressed work Rebecca West ever wrote, and its compression reflects the psychological pressure on each of its four characters. The story is simple— a philosophical puzzle, really. A man goes to war and leaves his cousin, Jenny, and his wife, Kitty, behind at his ancestral home, where they anxiously await his letters from the front, which have abruptly ceased. One day, a woman of visibly lower class appears at their house to tell them that their Captain Baldry—their Christopher—has been wounded and has written to her, Margaret Allington. He has written to her because he has lost his memory. He believes that it is fifteen years earlier, well before he married Kitty, and that he is still in love with Margaret, whose father kept an inn on Monkey Island in the Thames near the town of Bray. Christopher Baldry is soon brought home to convalesce. He recognizes his cousin but does not know his wife. Margaret has aged and married and endured a life of poverty, but when she and Chris meet again it is as though those fifteen years had never passed.
This is the story that Jenny, who is the narrator, tells. What embitters her telling is the poison of class. The woman who brings news of her cousin is “repulsively furred with neglect and poverty.” At first Jenny hates 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.” What also embitters Jenny is the peculiarity of her cousin’s predicament. “This house, this life with us, was the core of his heart,” she had believed. “He could not have been happier”—so Kitty says—and yet Chris is far happier in his partial amnesia than he ever was when he was normal. To Kitty, the very fact that her husband could have written familiarly to a woman living in Wealdstone—“the red suburban stain which fouls the fields three miles nearer London”—means that Chris “is no longer ours.” Yet as long as Chris’s amnesia continues, he cannot be sent back to the front.
To leave Chris as he is means that he might go on living “in the interminable enjoyment of his youth and love,” as Jenny puts it. “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.” But Jenny also recognizes that to leave him shut away in his amnesia would impair his dignity. “He would not be quite a man,” she concludes. Margaret teaches her that. “ ‘The truth’s the truth,’ she said, ‘and he must know it.’ ” The blunt symmetry of the novel pivots on the nature of love and what love makes of reality. Margaret will not claim Chris on the basis of a lie that diminishes him, even though it means sacrificing her own happiness. Kitty will not release Chris to Margaret, even if it means rescuing him from war.
From our distance, and stripped to these essentials, The Return of the Soldier sounds like a Solomonic mousetrap. But we don’t remain at our distance while reading the novel, and we confront it, as readers, not in its essentials but in the full imaginative thrust of West’s art. We’ve been taught by nearly everyone who has made art out of the First World War—by Wilfrid Owen and Frederic Manning, by Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves—to understand it from the trench’s mouth and to imagine an England lying tranquil over the Channel, keeping up as best it could the old values the war was tearing apart day by day. But The Return of the Soldier reminds us just how palpable the Western front really was in the gardens of England. The war films have infected Jenny’s imagination. Her dreams force upon her the horr
or of no-man’s-land. Every effort she and Kitty make to suspend the movement of time is doomed to fail, if only because their world had already failed even before Chris went off to war.
Near the end of the novel, Jenny offers the reader a remarkable vision, an apparition of Chris’s soul in a shop in some French village behind the lines. He stands at a counter where a “lewd and benevolent” old man offers him a choice between two crystal spheres, one containing Margaret “as she is transfigured in the light of eternity,” the other containing Kitty and Jenny walking “in bright dresses through our glowing gardens.” Chris reaches out for the sphere containing Margaret, and in doing so sends Kitty and Jenny’s world crashing to the floor. The old man, Jenny thinks, is “the soul of the universe, equally cognizant and disregardful of every living thing.” And what Chris has chosen in choosing Margaret, Jenny supposes, is “a woman whose bleak habit it was to champion the soul against the body,” who offers him both a return to the past—to the memory of those days on Monkey Island—and timelessness itself.
But where the soul can be imagined, there is also the dire evidence of the body to be considered. “A dead body,” West writes in her 1933 biography of St. Augustine, “presents its case against the world with tremendous forensic power.” To Kitty and Jenny, Margaret is worse than dead. She is unspeakably shabby. She embodies a world where “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.” Insulated by her wealth, Jenny notes that Margaret lives in “a town of people who could not do as they liked.”
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 look, 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 west- ward 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.
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 English-women 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 goldclubs; 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!