The Return of the Soldier Part 8

I felt the usual instinct to treat her as though she were ill, because it was evident that she was sustained by a mystic interpretation of life. But she had already taught me something, so I stood aside while she fell on her knees, and wondered why she did not look at the child's photograph, but pressed it to her bosom, as though to stanch a wound. I thought, as I have often thought before, that the childless have the greatest joy in children, for to us they are just slips of immaturity lovelier than the flowers and with the power over the heart, but to mothers they are fleshly cables binding one down to such profundities of feeling as the awful agony that now possessed her. For although I knew I would have accepted it with rapture because it was the result of intimacy with Chris, its awfulness appalled me. Not only did it make my body hurt with sympathy; it shook the ground beneath my feet. For that her serenity, which a moment before had seemed as steady as the earth and as all-enveloping as the sky, should be so utterly dispelled made me aware that I had of late been underestimating the cruelty of the order of things. Lovers are frustrated; children are not begotten that should have had the loveliest life; the pale usurpers of their birth die young. Such a world will not suffer magic circles to endure.

The parlor-maid knocked at the door.

"Mrs. Baldry and Dr. Anderson are waiting in the drawing-room, ma'am."

Margaret rea.s.sumed her majesty, and put her white face close to the gla.s.s as she pinned up her braids.

"I knew there was a something," she moaned, and set the hair-pins all awry. More she could not say, though I clung to her and begged her; but the slow gesture with which, as we were about to leave the room, she laid her hand across the child's photograph somehow convinced me that we were not to be victorious.

When we went into the drawing-room we found Dr. Anderson, plump and expository, balancing himself on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet on the hearth-rug and enjoying the caress of the fire on his calves, while Kitty, showing against the dark frame of her oak chair like a white rosebud that was still too innocent to bloom, listened with that slight reservation of the attention customary in beautiful women.

"A complete case of amnesia," he was saying as Margaret, white-lipped, yet less shy than I had ever seen her, went to a seat by the window, and I sank down on the sofa. "His unconscious self is refusing to let him resume his relations with his normal life, and so we get this loss of memory."

"I've always said," declared Kitty, with an air of good sense, "that if he would make an effort--"

"Effort!" He jerked his round head about. "The mental life that can be controlled by effort isn't the mental life that matters. You've been stuffed up when you were young with talk about a thing called self-control, a sort of barmaid of the soul that says, 'Time's up, gentlemen,' and 'Here, you've had enough.' There's no such thing.

There's a deep self in one, the essential self, that has its wishes. And if those wishes are suppressed by the superficial self,--the self that makes, as you say, efforts, and usually makes them with the sole idea of putting up a good show before the neighbors,--it takes its revenge. Into the house of conduct erected by the superficial self it sends an obsession, which doesn't, owing to a twist that the superficial self, which isn't candid, gives it, seem to bear any relation to the suppressed wish. A man who really wants to leave his wife develops a hatred for pickled cabbage which may find vent in performances that lead straight to the asylum. But that's all technical," he finished bluffly.

"My business to understand it, not yours. The point is, Mr. Baldry's obsession is that he can't remember the latter years of his life.

Well,"--his winking blue eyes drew us all into a community we hardly felt,--"what's the suppressed wish of which it's the manifestation?"

"He wished for nothing," said Kitty. "He was fond of us, and he had a lot of money."

"Ah, but he did!" countered the doctor, gleefully. He seemed to be enjoying it all. "Quite obviously he has forgotten his life here because he is discontented with it. What clearer proof could you need than the fact you were just telling me when these ladies came in--that the reason the War Office didn't wire to you when he was wounded was that he had forgotten to register his address? Don't you see what that means?"

"Forgetfulness," shrugged Kitty. "He isn't businesslike." She had always nourished a doubt as to whether Chris was really, as she put it, practical, and his income and his international reputation weighed nothing as against his evident inability to pick up pieces at sales.

"One forgets only those things that one wants to forget. It's our business to find out why he wanted to forget this life."

"He can remember quite well when he is hypnotized," she said obstructively. She had quite ceased to glow.

"Oh, hypnotism's a silly trick. It releases the memory of a dissociated personality which can't be related--not possibly in such an obstinate case as this--to the waking personality. I'll do it by talking to him.

Getting him to tell his dreams." He beamed at the prospect. "But you--it would be such a help if you would give me any clue to this discontent."

"I tell you," said Kitty, "he was not discontented till he went mad."

He caught the glint of her rising temper.

"Ah," he said, "madness is an indictment not of the people one lives with, only of the high G.o.ds. If there was anything, it's evident that it was not your fault." A smile sugared it, and knowing that where he had to flatter his dissecting hand had not an easy task, he turned to me, whose general appearance suggests that flattery is not part of my daily diet. "You, Miss Baldry, you've known him longest."

"Nothing and everything was wrong," I said at last. "I've always felt it." A sharp movement of Kitty's body confirmed my deep, old suspicion that she hated me.

He went back further than I expected.

"His relations with his father and mother, now?"

"His father was old when he was born, and always was a little jealous of him. His mother was not his sort. She wanted a stupid son who would have been satisfied with shooting."

He laid down a remark very softly, like a hunter setting a snare.

"He turned, then, to s.e.x 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 a.s.surance, 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 s.h.i.+vered 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 a.s.sented.

Kitty said: