The Return of the Soldier Part 3

I began to say what was in my mind to Kitty when she came in, but she moved past me, remote in preoccupation, and I was silent when I saw that she was dressed in all respects like a bride. The gown she wore on her wedding-day ten years ago had been cut and embroidered as this white satin was; her hair had been coiled low on her neck, as it was now.

Around her throat were her pearls, and her longer chain of diamonds dropped, looking cruelly bright, to her white, small b.r.e.a.s.t.s; because she held some needlework to her bosom, I saw that her right hand was stiff with rings and her left hand bare save for her wedding-ring. She dropped her load of flannel on a work-table and sat down, spreading out her skirts, in an arm-chair by the fire. With her lower lip thrust out, as if she were considering a menu, she lowered her head and looked down on herself. She frowned to see that the high lights on the satin shone scarlet from the fire, that her flesh glowed like a rose, and she changed her seat for a high-backed chair beneath the farthest candle-sconce. There were green curtains close by, and now the lights on her satin gown were green like cleft ice. She looked as cold as moonlight, as virginity, but precious; the falling candle-light struck her hair to bright, pure gold. So she waited for him.

There came suddenly a thud at the door. We heard Chris swear and stumble to his feet, while one of the servants spoke helpfully. Kitty knitted her brows, for she hates gracelessness, and a failure of physical adjustment is the worst indignity she can conceive.

"He's fallen down those three steps from the hall," I whispered.

"They're new." She did not listen, because she was controlling her face into harmony with the appearance of serene virginity upon which his eyes would fall when he entered the room.

His fall had ruffled him and made him look very large and red, and he breathed hard, like an animal pursued into a strange place by night, and to his hot consciousness of his disorder the sight of Kitty, her face and hands and bosom s.h.i.+ning like the snow, her gown enfolding her, and her gold hair crowning her with radiance, and the white fire of jewels giving pa.s.sion to the spectacle, was a deep refreshment. She sat still for a time, so that he might feel this well, then raised her ringed hand to her necklaces.

"It seems so strange that you should not remember me," she said. "You gave me all these."

He answered kindly:

"I am glad I did that. You look very beautiful in them." But as he spoke his gaze s.h.i.+fted to the shadows in the corners of the room, and the blood ran hot under his skin. He was thinking of another woman, of another beauty.

Kitty put up her hands as if to defend her jewels.

In that silence dinner was announced, and we went into the dining-room.

It is the fas.h.i.+on at Baldry Court to use no electric light save when there is work to be done or a great company to be entertained, and to eat and talk by the mild clarity of many candles. That night it was a kindly fas.h.i.+on, for we sat about the table with our faces veiled in shadow, and seemed to listen in quiet contentment to the talk of our man who had come back to us. Yet all through the meal I was near to weeping, because whenever he thought himself un.o.bserved he looked at the things that were familiar to him. Dipping his head, he would glance sidewise at the old oak paneling, and nearer things he fingered as though sight were not intimate enough a contact. His hand caressed the arm of his chair, because he remembered the black gleam of it, stole out and touched the recollected salt-cellar. It was his furtiveness that was heartrending; it was as though he were an outcast, and we who loved him stout policemen. Was Baldry Court so sleek a place that the unhappy felt offenders there? Then we had all been living wickedly, and he, too. As his fingers glided here and there he talked bravely about non-committal things: to what ponies we had been strapped when at the age of five we were introduced to the hunting-field; how we had teased to be allowed to keep swans in the pond above the wood, and how the yellow bills of our intended pets had sent us shrieking homeward; and all the dear life that makes the bland English country-side secretly adventurous. "Funny thing," he said. "All the time I was at Boulogne I wanted to see a kingfisher, that blue scudding down a stream, or a heron's flight round a willow--" He checked himself suddenly; his head fell forward on his chest. "You have no herons here, of course," he said drearily, and fingered the arm of his chair again. Then he raised his head again, brisk with another subject. "Do they still have trouble with foxes at Steppy End?"

Kitty shook her head.

"I don't know."

"Griffiths will know," Chris said cheerily, and swung round on his seat to ask the butler, and found him osseous, where Griffiths was rotund; dark, where Griffiths had been merrily mottled; strange, where Griffiths had been a part of home, a condition of life. He sat back in his chair as though his heart had stopped.

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 circ.u.mstances his prison-bars. There was suspicion in the gesture with which, when we were back in the drawing-room 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 search-light 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 to-morrow. 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 pa.s.sed 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 in 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's how you feel, I know." She gathered up her needlework. "I'm going to bed.