Rebecca West - Return of the Soldier

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Rebecca West - Return of the Soldier (Virago 2014, originally Nisbet & Co., 1918).

Blurb:
The soldier returns from the front to find three women from his past. There's Kitty, his wife, with her cool, moonlight beauty; and his devoted cousin Jenny, who never quite admits her love for him.

But it's Margaret whom shell-shocked Chris remembers - his first love of fifteen years before. His cousin he recalls only as a childhood playmate, and his wife not at all. The women have a choice: to leave him as he is or to 'cure' him ...


"You don't realise how little there is in the Bible really till you go to it for help."

Loaned from the library having been tipped off that, for the most part, the story is set in 'Baldry Court,' a grand estate in rural Harrowweald (Grims Dyke lodge?). One afternoon, a Mrs. Margaret Grey arrives from Ladysmith Road, Wealdstone, "the red suburban stain which fouls the fields three miles nearer London than Harrowweald." Mrs Grey, shabbily dressed, old before her time, sheepishly informs the lady of the house that she has news of her husband, Captain Baldry, that he is being cared for in the Queen Mary hospital, Boulogne. Kitty Baldry hears her out with a sneer. As if the War Office would inform this wretched individual of her husband's whereabouts before her! She knows her game. Out for money like the rest of her class! But, as a friend of the family shortly confirms, Margaret is telling the truth. The Captain is physically unharmed, but shell shock has wiped his memory of the past fifteen years. He has no recollection of his marriage nor the tragic death of his little boy five years ago. Kitty is a stranger. Although the mirror confirms otherwise, he believes himself a young undergraduate engaged to the girl he loves, Margaret, the landlord's daughter of the Monkey Island inn. He politely asks that his fiancée be invited to Baldry Court.

Kitty detests her peasant love-rival and refuses to breathe the same air, so it falls to her best friend to act as intermediary. Initially Jenny, Christopher's cousin, who secretly loves him, shares Kitty's contempt for this dismal creature — how can Chris feel anything for a woman so beneath him? Gradually, as she comes to know Margaret, Jenny's disdain turns to admiration; how does this poor woman cope with a weak-chested, needy husband ("he's never been very successful") and the cruellest bereavement (it transpires the Grey's lost their only child five years ago at the same time the Baldry's beloved Oliver died) That Margaret still loves Chris much as he does her is obvious. What is to be done? As their friendship grows, Jenny finds her sympathies transferred from vacuous, entitled and often unpleasant Kitty to her rival.

Kitty has the psychoanalyst, Dr. Gilbert Anderson, examine her husband. Margaret, resigned to losing Chris again, desperately wants what's best for him.

'Doctor,' she said, her mild voice roughened, 'what's the use of talking? You can't cure him ... 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.'

Chris alone is contented with the situation - ecstatically so. Might it not be kinder to leave him be rather than return him to his slow death sentence of a marriage?

Nearest we come to any "supernatural" content is Jenny's dream/ premonition of Chris sprinting across "the brown rottenness" of no man's land, daring not to look down at whose remains he's trampling into the mud. Even so, the pay-off alone probably qualifies The Return of the Soldier as an overlooked (?) quiet horror novella. Astonishing that the author was just 24 years old when her story first saw publication over the February and March 1918 issues of Century magazine.