The Return of the Soldier

by Rebecca West

  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!”

  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 armchair, 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 spiri
t 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?”