The Return of the Soldier

turned the corner of the house and came on Dr. Gilbert Anderson. I was startled, to begin with, by his unmedical appearance. He was a little man with winking blue eyes, a flushed and crumpled fore

is-ball which he had discovered somewhere had roused his sporting instincts, and he was trying at what range it was possible to kick it between two large stones which

ion of the detective tone, "are the patient." He rolled his blue eye on me, took a good look, and, as he realized I did not matter, shook off the unnecessary impression like a dog coming out of water. He faced Margaret as though she were the n

this singular specialist, to sidetrack my foreboding by pronouncing him a bounder, to wish, as my foreboding

We stood about uneasily in its gloaming. Margaret looked round her and said in a voice flattened by the despondency she evidently shared with me: "It is nice to have everything ready that people can want and everythin

ecause she was going to meet a new man and anticipated the kindling of admiration in his eyes, and I smiled, contrasting her probable prefiguring of Dr. Anderson with the amiable rotundity we had just encountered. Not that it would have made any difference if she had seen him. Beautiful women of her type lose, in this matter of admiration alone, their otherwise tremendous

lking to Chris o

fair, the one a polished surface that reflected light, like a mirror hung opposite a window, the other a lamp grimed by the smoke of careless use, b

t her cordiality as one shakes out a fan. "It's very kind

Margaret, shyly, "I shal

egged Kitty

up-stairs and along the corridors very slowly, like a child paddling in a summer sea. She enjoyed the feeling of the thick carpet underfoot; she looked lingeringly at the pictures on the wall; occasionally she put a finger to touch a vase as if by that she made its preciousness more her own. Her spirit, I could see, was as deeply concerned about Chris as was mine; but she had such faith

use for petticoats, she exclaimed softly Kitty's praises. "I know I shouldn't make personal remarks, but Mrs. Baldry is lovely. She has three circles round her neck. I've only two." It was a touching betrayal that she possessed that intimate knowledge of her own person which comes to women who have been loved. I could not for the life of me have

ovely hai

alf-hearted attempts to smooth the straggling tendrils on her temples, but presently laid down her

is plumpness between Chris and Margaret, who since that afternoon seemed to me as not only a woman whom it was good to love, but, as a patron saint must appear to a Catholic, as an intercessory being whose kindliness could be daunted only by some special and incredibly malicious decision of the Supreme Force. I

aph of Oliver that I keep on my dressing-table. It is his

this?" s

ris ever had. He d

year

it mat

," I

my Dick." Her eyes grew

st

both were breathing

but delicate from his birth. At the end

hought he would be up and abo

uddenly paralyzed. She seemed to

he stammered, "they

dren, 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 gro

aid knocked

derson are waiting in t

d put her white face close to the

ugh I clung to her and begged her; but the slow gesture with which, as we were about to leave the room,

arth-rug and enjoying the caress of the fire on his calves, while Kitty, showing against the dark frame of her oak chair like a whit

er seen her, went to a seat by the window, and I sank down on the sofa. "His unconscious self is

ty, with an air of good sense, "

sed 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

d Kitty. "He was fond of us,

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 re

as to whether Chris was really, as she put it, practical, and his income and his internatio

wants to forget. It's our business to fi

is hypnotized," she said obstructi

y in such an obstinate case as this-to the waking personality. I'll do it by talking to him. Getting him to tell his d

y, "he was not disconte

glint of her

hat 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 t

I've always felt it." A sharp movement of Kitty's bod

further tha

ith his father a

tle jealous of him. His mother was not his sort. She wante

very softly, like a

n, to sex with

e, shuffling her feet aw

as always

ht 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 cau

g an intellectual equal. "It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal

inued wi

emory so strong that it would recall eve

t his glib assurance, his knowingn

m willing

f the boy," s

denly to balance on t

at

had

ked at

me nothing

d and looked cold, as she always did at the memory of h

nice, and said with the soft malignity of a

st difficult to deal with." Sharply he tur

the boy wore, some

yes met

ve to be you

ce ass

ty

broke the silence that Margaret's wisdom had brought down on us. Then Dr. Anderson,

know, but

e soared in

o it now. Jenny, take Mrs. Grey up to the n

ursery, please." Yet as I walked beside her up the stairs I knew this compliance was not the indication of any melting of this new steely sternness. The very breathing that I heard as I knelt beside her at the nursery door and eased the disused lock seemed to come from a different and a harsher body

y prepared for her. Yet when she reached the hearth and stood with her hands behind her on the fireguard, looking about her at all the exquisite devices of our nursery to rivet health and amusement on our reluctant little visitor, it was so apparent that she was a mother that I could not imagine how it was that I had not always known it. It has sometimes happened that painters who have kept close enough to earth to see a heavenly

she cried. "But whe

ursery. The night nursery we didn

hought of the cockered

o the rocking-horse and gave a ghostly child a ride. For long she hummed a tuneless song into the sunshine and retreated far away into some maternal dream. "He was too young for this," she said. "His daddy must have given him it. I knew it. Men always give them presents above their age, they're in such a hurry for them to grow up. We like them to take their time, the loves. But where's his engine? Didn't he love puffer-tra

brain was the prayers his Scotch nurse taught him, and he didn't bother much over them. He wou

telpiece. It was odd that she showed no interest in my search for the most memorable garment. A vivacity which played above her tear-wet strength, like a ball of St. Elmo's fire on the mast of a stout ship, made me re

wished, in the strangest way, that I

what he did

skin of the clockwork dog

petition in the night had made it as instinctive a reaction to suffering as a moan, "I want a child! I want a child!" Her arms invoked the wasted life t

not only by her news, but also by her agony. I rose and took

e of the blue jerseys he used to wear. This is the red

tenderness for the child that had been. She looked broo

y things he will remem

om her I could

ball, changed them from arm to

up the jersey, and neatly set the ball upon it on the ottoman, and regarded them wit

tar

take them out to Chris?" She wrung her hands; her weak voi

ped he

" I said. I might have known th

mind gath

how little there is in the Bible really till you go to it for help. But I've lived a hard life and I've always done my best for William, and I know nothing in the world matters so much as happiness. If anybody's happy, you ought to let them be. So I came again. Let him be. If you knew how happy he was just pottering round t

helter. "If my boy had been a cripple,-he wasn't; he had the loveliest limbs,-and the doctors had said to me, 'We'll

tell them. I told them, anyhow. But, oh, I can't do it! Go out and put an end to the poor love's happi

t to do it

a finality about his happiness which usually belongs only to loss and calamity; he was to be as happy as a ring cast into the sea is lost, as a man whose

t to do it

but the attention died in her eyes. She stared ove

r in the corridors, and it sprawled leaf-brown across her white frock, wriggling for joy at the unaccustomed embrace. That she should at last have stooped to lift the lonely little dog was a sign of her deep unhappiness. Why she had come up I do not know, nor why her face puckered with tears as she looked in on us. It was not that

he cup of lies about life that Kitty's white hands held to him and turn to Margaret with this vast trustful gesture of his loss of memory. And helped by me, she had forgotten that it is the first concern of love to safeguard the dignity of the beloved, so that neither God in his skies nor the boy peering through the hedge should find in all time one possibility for contempt, and had handed him the trivial toy of happiness. We had been utterly negligent of his future, blasphemously careless of the divine essential of his soul. For if we left him in his magic circle there would come a time when his delusion turned to a senile idiocy; when his joy at the sight

s simplicity with this last cruel subtlety,

e jersey an

er eyes, and they were again

uth," she said, "an

she could not leave her throne of righteousness for long, and she repeated

She took the jersey and the ball, and clasped them as though they were a child. When she got to the door she stopped and l

rim of his gray eyes, the harsh and diffident masculinity of him, I found comfort in remembering that there was a physical gallantry about him which would still, even when the worst had happened, leap sometimes to the joy of life. Always, to the very end, when the sun shone on his face or his horse took his fences well, he would

sa

ry up. She's got to d

ret was breaking his heart and hers, using word

back?" asked Kitty.

olumn of birds swinging across the lake o

fter Kitty sp

do loo

o which, against all his hopes, business had forced him to return. He stepped aside to avoid a patch of brightness cast by a lighted window on the grass; lights in our house were worse than darkness, affection worse than hate elsewhere. He wore a dreadful, decent smile; I knew how his voice would resolutely lift in greeting us. He walked not loose-limbed like a boy, as he had done that very afterno

they there?" Ki

e both

comin

coming

ny! How doe

I say it?-"every

the window, peered ov

in her breath w

e whispered slow

E