The Return of the Soldier

by Rebecca West

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.

Why had modern life brought forth these horrors, which made the old tragedies seem no more than nursery-shows? And

when she picks up facts she kind of gives them a motherly hug. She’s charity and love itself.”

I suppose a thing that one has looked at with some one one loves acquires forever after a special significance.

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; thoughts prick one through sleep like mosquitos.

They were naturally my friends, these gentle, speculative people. Then suddenly I was stunned with jealousy. It was not their love for each other that caused me such agony at that moment; it was the thought of the things their eyes had rested upon together. I imagined that white hawthorn among the poplars by the ferry on which they had looked fifteen years ago at Monkey Island, and it was more than I could bear.

Chris is wholly inclosed in his intentness on his chosen crystal. No one weeps for this shattering of our world.

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. I

“If humanity forgets these attitudes there is an end to the world.”

It means that the woman has gathered the soul of the man into her soul and is keeping it warm in love and peace so that his body can rest quiet for a little time. That is a great thing for a woman to do. I

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.

While her spell endured they could not send him back into the hell of war. This wonderful, kind woman held his body as safely as she held his soul.

Beautiful women of her type lose, in this matter of admiration alone, their otherwise tremendous sense of class distinction; they are obscurely aware that it is their 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.

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.

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

don’t notice how little there is in the Bible really till you go to it for help.