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[Illustration: frontispiece]




THE RETURN
OF THE SOLDIER

BY
REBECCA WEST

NEW [Illustration: colophon] YORK

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1918,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER
-C-
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


He lay there in the confiding relaxation of
a child                                     _Frontispiece_

                                                    FACING
                                                      PAGE

"Give it a brush now and then, like a good
soul"                                                    6

She would get into the four-foot punt that
was used as a ferry and bring it over very
slowly                                                  66

"I oughtn't to do it, ought I?"                        176




THE RETURN
OF THE SOLDIER




CHAPTER I


"Ah, don't begin to fuss!" wailed Kitty. "If a woman began to worry in
these days because her husband hadn't written to her for a fortnight!
Besides, if he'd been anywhere interesting, anywhere where the fighting
was really hot, he'd have found some way of telling me instead of just
leaving it as 'Somewhere in France.' He'll be all right."

We were sitting in the nursery. I had not meant to enter it again, now
that the child was dead; but I had come suddenly on Kitty as she slipped
the key into the lock, and I had lingered to look in at the high room,
so full of whiteness and clear colors, so unendurably gay and familiar,
which is kept in all respects as though there were still a child in the
house. It was the first lavish day of spring, and the sunlight was
pouring through the tall, arched windows and the flowered curtains so
brightly that in the old days a fat fist would certainly have been
raised to point out the new, translucent glories of the rosebud.
Sunlight was lying in great pools on the blue cork floor and the soft
rugs, patterned with strange beasts, and threw dancing beams, which
should have been gravely watched for hours, on the white paint and the
blue distempered walls. It fell on the rocking-horse, which had been
Chris's idea of an appropriate present for his year-old son, and showed
what a fine fellow he was and how tremendously dappled; it picked out
Mary and her little lamb on the chintz ottoman. And along the
mantelpiece, under the loved print of the snarling tiger, in attitudes
that were at once angular and relaxed, as though they were ready for
play at their master's pleasure, but found it hard to keep from drowsing
in this warm weather, sat the Teddy Bear and the chimpanzee and the
woolly white dog and the black cat with eyes that roll. Everything was
there except Oliver. I turned away so that I might not spy on Kitty
revisiting her dead. But she called after me:

"Come here, Jenny. I'm going to dry my hair." And when I looked again I
saw that her golden hair was all about her shoulders and that she wore
over her frock a little silken jacket trimmed with rosebuds. She looked
so like a girl on a magazine cover that one expected to find a large "15
cents" somewhere attached to her person. She had taken Nanny's big
basket-chair from its place by the high-chair, and was pushing it over
to the middle window. "I always come in here when Emery has washed my
hair. It's the sunniest room in the house. I wish Chris wouldn't have
it kept as a nursery when there's no chance--" She sat down, swept her
hair over the back of the chair into the sunlight, and held out to me
her tortoiseshell hair-brush. "Give it a brush now and then, like a good
soul; but be careful. Tortoise snaps so!"

I took the brush and turned to the window, leaning my forehead against
the glass and staring unobservantly at the view. You probably know the
beauty of that view; for when Chris rebuilt Baldry Court after his
marriage he handed it over to architects who had not so much the wild
eye of the artist as the knowing wink of the manicurist, and between
them they massaged the dear old place into matter for innumerable
photographs in the illustrated papers. The house lies on the crest of
Harrowweald, and from its windows the eye drops to miles of emerald
pasture-land lying wet and brilliant under a westward line of sleek
hills; blue with distance and distant woods, while nearer it range the
suave decorum of the lawn and the Lebanon cedar, the branches of which
are like darkness made palpable, and the minatory gauntnesses of the
topmost pines in the wood that breaks downward, its bare boughs a close
texture of browns and purples, from the pond on the edge of the hill.

[Illustration: "Give it a brush now and then, like a good soul"]

That day its beauty was an affront to me, because, like most
Englishwomen of my time, I was wishing for the return of a soldier.
Disregarding the national interest and everything else except the keen
prehensile gesture of our hearts toward him, I wanted to snatch my
Cousin Christopher from the wars and seal him in this green pleasantness
his wife and I now looked upon. Of late I had had bad dreams about him.
By nights I saw Chris running across the brown rottenness of
No-Man's-Land, starting back here because he trod upon a hand, not even
looking there because of the awfulness of an unburied head, and not till
my dream was packed full of horror did I see him pitch forward on