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

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 gar-den 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 backwater 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 tonight, 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