The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West (classic children's novels txt) 📕

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-caved 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