The Return of the Soldier quotes

"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.

"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.

Then there had been the difficult task of learning to live after the death of his little son. It had lain on us, the responsibility, which gave us dignity, to compensate him for his lack of free adventure by arranging him a gracious life.

But now, just because our performance had been so brilliantly adequate, how dreary was the empty stage!

We were not, perhaps, specially contemptible women, because nothing could ever really become a part of our life until it had been referred to Chris's attention.

He had exchanged his expectation of becoming a red Indian for the equally wistful aspiration of becoming completely reconciled to life.

It was his hopeless hope that some time he would have an experience that would act on his life like alchemy, turning to gold all the dark metals of events, and from that revelation he would go on his way rich with an inextinguishable joy.

There had been, of course, no chance of his ever getting it. Literally there wasn't room to swing a revelation in his crowded life.

There had been, of course, no chance of his ever getting it.

Literally there wasn't room to swing a revelation in his crowded life.

First of all, at his father's death he had been obliged to take over a business that was weighted by the needs of a mob of female relatives who were all useless either in the old way, with antimacassars, or in the new way, with …

… brought against us whose passion for Chris was our point of honor, because we would not shriek at her false news, the impudently bright, indignant gaze she flung at us, the lift of her voice that pretended she could not understand our coolness and irrelevance.

I pushed the purse away from me with my toe, and hated her as the rich hate the poor as insect things that will struggle out of the crannies which are their decent home and introduce ugliness to the light of day.

And Kitty said in a voice shaken with pitilessness:

… whose beauty was as changed in grief from its ordinary seeming as a rose in moonlight is different from a rose by day, took me down after lunch to the greenhouses and had a snappishly competent conversation about the year's vegetables with Pipe, the gardener.

Then Kitty went into the drawing-room and filled the house with the desolate merriment of an inattentively played pianola, while I sat in the hall and wrote letters and noticed how sad dance-music has sounded ever since the war began.

After that she started a savage raid of domestic efficiency, and made the housemaids cry because the brass handles of the tall-boys were not bright enough and because there was only ten-to-one instead of a hundred-to-one risk of breaking a leg on the parquet.

"Oh, I'll take you up," Kitty rang out efficiently. She pulled at his coat-sleeve, so they started level on the lowest step.

But as they went up, the sense of his separateness beat her back; she lifted her arms as though she struggled through a fog, and fell behind.

When he reached the top she was standing half-way down the stairs, her hands clasped under her chin. But he did not see her. He was looking along the corridor and saying, "This house is different."

The dusk flowed in wet and cool from the garden, as if to put out the fire of confusion lighted on our hearthstone, and the furniture, very visible through that soft evening opacity with the observant brightness of old, well-polished wood, seemed terribly aware.

Strangeness had come into the house, and everything was appalled by it, even time.

For the moments dragged. It seemed to me, half an hour later, that I had been standing for an infinite period in the drawing-room, remembering that in the old days the blinds had never been drawn in this room because old Mrs.

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.

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:

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 circumstances 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.

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.

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.

"Yes, Chris." She was sweet and obedient and alert.

The whole world seemed melting into light. Cumulus-clouds floated very high, like lumps of white light, against a deep, glowing sky, and dropped dazzling reflections on the beaming Thames.

The trees moved not like timber, shocked by wind, but floatingly, like weeds at the bottom of a well of sunshine.

When Margaret came out of the porch and paused, as she always did, to crush and smell the walnut-leaf and shade her eyes with her hand, her white dress shone like silver.

… three-cornered lawn that shelved high over the stream at the island's end, regarding the river, which was now something more wonderful than water, because it had taken to its bosom the rose and amber glories of the sunset smoldering behind the elms and Bray church-tower.

Birds sat on the telegraph wires that spanned the river as the black notes sit on a staff of music.

Then she went to the window of the parlor and rested her cheek against the glass, looking in.

When we asked them the way they turned to us faces sour with thrift.

It was a town of people who could not do as they liked.

And here Margaret lived in a long road of red-brick boxes, flecked here and there with the pink blur of almond-blossom, which debouched in a flat field where green grass rose up rank through clay mold blackened by coal-dust from the railway.

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;

But instead she said: "It's a big place. Chris must have worked hard to keep all this up."

The pity of this woman was like a flaming sword.

No one had ever before pitied Chris for the magnificence of Baldry Court. It had been our pretense that by wearing costly clothes and organizing a costly life we had been the servants of his desire.

But instead she said: "It's a big place. Chris must have worked hard to keep all this up." The pity of this woman was like a flaming sword.

No one had ever before pitied Chris for the magnificence of Baldry Court.

It had been our pretense that by wearing costly clothes and organizing a costly life we had been the servants of his desire. But she revealed the truth that, although he did indeed desire a magnificent house, it was a house not built with hands.

They stood with clasped hands looking at one another. They looked straight, they looked delightedly! And then, as if resuming a conversation tiresomely interrupted by some social obligation, they drew together again, and passed under the tossing branches of the cedar to the wood beyond.

I reflected, while Kitty shrilly wept, how entirely right Chris had been in his assertion that to lovers innumerable things do not matter.

AFTER the automobile had taken Margaret away Chris came to us as we sat in the drawing-room, and, after standing for a while in the glow of the fire, hesitantly said:

… at a fine tracery of bare boughs against the hard, high spring sky while the cold wind rushed through my skirts and chilled me to the bone, because I was afraid that when I moved my body and my attention I might begin to think.

Indeed, grief is not the clear melancholy the young believe it. It is like a siege in a tropical city.

The skin dries and the throat parches as though one were living in the heat of the desert; water and wine taste warm in the mouth, and food is of the substance of the sand; one snarls at one's company;

"He is here. This garden holds him." My moment, my small sole subsistence, ended in a feeling of jealousy as ugly and unmental as sickness.

This was the saddest spring.

Nothing could mitigate the harshness of our dejection. You may think we were attaching an altogether fictitious importance to what was merely the delusion of a madman.

… smiling courteously, but without joy, and answering their questions with the crisp politeness of a man shaking off an inquisitive commercial traveler in a hotel smoking-room, it became plain that if madness means a liability to wild error about the world Chris was not mad.

It was our peculiar shame that he had rejected us when he had attained to something saner than sanity.

His very loss of memory was a triumph over the limitations of language which prevent the mass of men from making explicit statements about their spiritual relationships. If he had said to Kitty and me, "I do not know you," we would have gaped;

It was our peculiar shame that he had rejected us when he had attained to something saner than sanity.

His very loss of memory was a triumph over the limitations of language which prevent the mass of men from making explicit statements about their spiritual relationships.

If he had said to Kitty and me, "I do not know you," we would have gaped; if he had expanded his meaning and said, "You are nothing to me;

The old man's smile continues to be lewd and benevolent; he is still not more interested in me than in the bare-armed woman. Chris is wholly inclosed in his intentness on his chosen crystal.

No one weeps for this shattering of our world.

I stirred on the dead leaves as though I had really heard the breaking of the globe and cried out, "Gilbert Anderson, Gilbert Anderson must cure him."

… tropical sense of danger, too, for I walked as apprehensively as though a snake coiled under every leaf, because I feared to come on them when he was speaking to her without looking at her or thinking in silence while he played with her hand.

Embraces do not matter; they merely indicate the will to love, and may as well be followed by defeat as victory.

But disregard means that now there needs to be no straining of the eyes, no stretching forth of the hands, no pressing of the lips, because theirs is such a union that they are no longer aware of the division of their flesh.

But disregard means that now there needs to be no straining of the eyes, no stretching forth of the hands, no pressing of the lips, because theirs is such a union that they are no longer aware of the division of their flesh.

I know it must be so; a lonely life gives one opportunities of thinking these things out.

I could not have borne to see signs of how he had achieved this intimacy with the woman whom a sudden widening of the downward vista showed as she leaned her bent back, ridged by her cheap stays, against a birch that some special skill …

Indeed she had been generous to us all, for at her touch our lives had at last fallen into a pattern; she was the sober thread the interweaving of which with our scattered magnificences had somewhat achieved the design that otherwise would not appear.

Perhaps even her dinginess was part of her generosity, for in order to fit into the pattern one has sometimes to forego something of one's individual beauty.

That is why women like us do not wear such obviously lovely dresses as cocottes, but clothe ourselves in garments that by their slight neglect of the possibilities of beauty declare that there are such things as thrift and restraint and care for the future.

It was an intrusion, but I wanted to be near her. She did not look surprised when she turned to me her puckered brows, but smiled through the ugly fringe of vagrant hairs the weather had plucked from under the hard rim of her hat.

It was part of her loveliness that even if she did not understand an act she could accept it.

Presently she leaned over to me across his body and whispered:

… civilizing mission to flash the jewel of their beauty before all men, so that they shall desire it and work to get the wealth to buy it, and thus be seduced by a present appetite to a tilling of the earth that serves the future.

There is, you know, really room for all of us; we each have our peculiar use.

"The doctor's talking to Chris outside," I said.

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.

"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.

"

One forgets only those things that one wants to forget.

It's our business to find out why he wanted to forget this life."

She was arguing not with me, but with the whole hostile, reasonable world. "Mind you, I wasn't sure if I ought to come the second time, seeing we both were married and that. I prayed and read the Bible, but I couldn't get any help.

You don't notice 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.

You don't notice 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 the garden. Men do love a garden. He could just go on. It can go on so easily." But there was a shade of doubt in her voice;