"Do you understand this, Little Yeogh Wough? You are not likely ever to be a soldier, but you have got to carry all this out in ordinary life, as much as in war."
Oh, yes! Yes! I was making him a soldier with every day and night that passed. But I did not know it. Ah! If I could have looked forward and seen myself as I am to-night, sitting here waiting for him to come home from the trenches on his second leave!
"You don't want me to be a real soldier when I grow up, do you, mother?" he asked me.
"Well, no, dear, I don't think I do. I don't think it will be enough for you to occupy all your mind with. You see, soldiering is an ornamental affair with us. It isn't as if we made a thorough business of it, as the Germans do—though, when I had the good luck the other evening to meet the biggest military man of to-day and have a talk with him, he said it was one of our worst mistakes to think that no brains are wanted in the Army. He said we want all the best brains we can get, and the more of them the better."
Sometimes, when I left the boy, after tucking him in and pulling back his curtains and opening his window, I met the sturdy Old Nurse, who had been lying in wait for me.
"If you please'm, I wish you'd speak to that there Master Roland and make 'im behave 'isself better. I can't think how you thinks he's such a good boy and so reasonable. Why, the way he do carry on in the nursery is something shocking. He hid his myganas to-night till I was a hour and more 'unting for them and 'ad to air 'im a clean suit of them to go to bed in. You spoils 'im so that there's no doin' nothin' with 'im when your back's turned."
She was indignantly holding out a suit of pyjamas. I did my best to look stern.
"You know very well, Nurse, that I always punish him when he deserves punishment. I gave him a touch of the cane only last week."
She made her long upper lip look longer.
"'M, yes. M'say, there's punishing and punishing. There's some ways of caning that's more like petting than anything else. Why, now, didn't you tell me that those two young gentlemen as was dining here the other night wasn't very well? That's Master Roland's doings. They 'ad that bottle of still 'Ock as 'ad been uncorked and corked up again, and Master Roland, 'e thought as it ought to be sparkling 'Ock, and he took and emptied all the Pyretic Saline into it—a new full bottle. What I d'say is, if you spoils a child——"
I left the good Gloucestershire woman to go on with her mumblings unheeded. But now, remembering how she always accused me of spoiling him, I asked myself if I really did so.
Did I really spoil him? If so, it was only a little, and I am glad—glad—glad—knowing as I do what he has had to bear since he went out to the trenches.
He, who had been so shielded, has learned during this past year what it is like to have the brains of a man you knew and cared for spattered all over you as you stand in your trench. He has learned what it feels like to slip and fall on something soft and slime-like on his way to a new trench at night and then to find that he had slid his hand into the decaying body of a long-dead German soldier. He has heard wild screams of women at night from the depths of a wood, and weeks afterwards has come upon murdered nuns lying cold and piteous, seven of them together. When I think of all this I thank God that he has at least a happy childhood to look back upon.
He says in his last letter that he has learnt much and gained much and grown up suddenly and got to know the ways of the world. This has made me curiously uneasy. I have a fear that it may cover up something—some experience that I should not have liked him to go through. And yet—while he can still sign himself Little Yeogh Wough, I know that he is not lost nor utterly spoiled. I know that in spite of the new life and its duties and horrors, there is even yet a good deal of the old life left in him. He is still the "old Roland"; still mine—the boy of my heart.
I went to look at his room, feeling that it ought to be done up before he comes home.
It would certainly be improved by new wallpaper, but I dare not have this improvement made. Superstition reminds me that I have often noticed how unlucky people have been who have had their bedrooms done up. They are always either ill in the rooms or else never occupy them any more. I decided at once that I would not have it done. The room was attractive enough, as it is, with its high, narrow, mirror-hung door leading into the bathroom, and its vast wardrobe packed full now with his ordinary clothes, his military great-coat—too long and cumbersome for the trenches, even in winter—and piles of small books which in the past two years he has bought out of his own pocket-money; and his sword.
The bed had an air as if it were waiting for him. The darling boy! How thankfully he nestled down between the sheets when he came home the first time! His big brown eyes were almost wild, that night. He had the look of a man who has been back for a time into savage life and wonders at the most everyday things of civilisation.
"I haven't slept in a proper bed since I first went out," he said.
"Why, what about that French château where you said everything was so luxurious?" I asked him.
"Oh, everything is comparative!" He laughed. "I had a feather bed on the floor there and it seemed to be almost a wicked luxury even though there were no sheets or pillows and I had only my brown blanket over me."
Yes, even then, a fortnight ago, his bed had an air of expectancy about it, as if it knew that he had written to say he was coming again. Above the head of it the wall was bare, because I had left it to him to decide what should be put there, and he never cared two straws what his room looked like as long as it had all the little things he wanted in it and was within a dozen yards of a bathroom.
That unlucky bathroom! Why is it that bathrooms and staircases cause more angry passions in a household than anything else?
I, for example, am not a bad-tempered woman. I am positive that even my worst enemy—my worst feminine enemy—would think twice before laying ill-temper to my charge; yet when anybody meets me on the stairs, or comes upstairs close behind me, I feel inhuman. I quite understand the mood of the late editor of one of the great daily newspapers, who drove from his house without notice any servant unlucky enough to meet him on the stairs. So, too, when a new London club was started a few years ago in a very tall and narrow house, I said it could never succeed, because all the people—members and servants alike—were always mounting and descending the staircases, like Burne Jones's figures on the Golden Stairs. And it did not succeed.
In the same way, most men cannot bear that the door of any room, even the most private, in their own home should be locked against them. And this brings me back to the bathroom and Little Yeogh Wough.
When a bathroom is of the ordinary kind, the only cause of trouble, as a rule, is whether the hot water is hot enough. But this particular bathroom has three doors, and the occupants of the three contiguous rooms from which those doors give access occasionally emerged at the same time and fiercely disputed possession of the means of cleanliness.
When Little Yeogh Wough was at home he usually slipped in at a well-chosen moment by his particular door and, locking the two other doors on the inside, remained master of the situation, while various other members of the family, and notably his father, stormed outside. The boy had always been a fanatical devotee of the Bath, and since he has been in the trenches and personal cleanliness has been difficult, he has become more so than ever. He loves his room because of this door leading into the bathroom, and more so still because of the long mirror set in the door on his own side.
For he is vain, my Little Yeogh Wough. There is nothing effeminate about him, though he knows a great deal of womanly lore and could, for instance, choose the right lace for a particular gown as well as I could do it myself. There is nothing of the tailor's or hairdresser's dummy about him, with clothes looking like those pictured in an illustrated booklet and hair plastered with the meticulous exactitude required of men going into a Thames racing craft, where one hair more on one side or the other might sink the cranky shell and plunge them into the river. He is smart and polished and speckless as any prince with a valet at five hundred a year, and he brilliantined his rather fair and very rebellious locks until in the process of subduing they became many shades darker than their natural hue; yet he always saw clearly and maintained firmly that clothes should set off the man or woman and not be allowed to make use of the glorious human figure as a mere peg on which to display themselves, while hair should never advertise the coiffeur. So, though he has always examined himself before looking-glasses and had pots of all sorts of toilet things on his dressing-table, yet he has always been the manliest of the manly.
"Why shouldn't a boy look in the glass as well as a girl?" he said to me one day. "I don't see why it should only be the females that are allowed to take pleasure in whatever good things in the way of looks may happen to have been given them."
All his little personal ways came back to me as I moved about his room, making sure that nothing should be missing when he came. The back brush he had bought for the bath looked a little dusty, so I washed it. Even as I did this, snatches of poems which I would rather not have remembered just then kept on coming to my mind and my lips. There was a poem called "Aftermath" in The Times, which I shall never be able to forget. It begins:
And then the last line of some verses which I saw somewhere else, headed "The Second Lieutenant":
and, best and worst of all, Rupert Brooke's:
When I got to this point, the tears which had been blinding me so that I could hardly see what I was doing brimmed over and fell on the back brush. Why did I let those tears come when I ought to have been smiling and singing because he is coming home?
I might as well be foolish enough to cry now, when I am sitting here waiting for him and when I know that at some blessed moment during the next half-hour he is bound to come in.
I was quite angry with myself when I wiped my tears away that time a fortnight ago. I dried the back brush with unnecessary energy and then took another and closer look about his room.
One of his hats and his riding whip hung together on the wall above shelves of books which he had bought himself. Every one of those books spoke to me of him as I glanced at their titles. Another bookcase was gloriously rich with his Public School prizes. Such handsome, wonderful books they are; and there are about fifty of them. What a tale they tell of power and effort! I had had a curtain made for the bookcase, to keep the dust away from these most precious of treasures, and as I drew the velvet folds back now and looked at the massive ornamental volumes, I felt a thrill at the thought that my continual spurring of him onward and upward had not been in vain.
"And he has never disappointed me," I thought aloud.
No, he had never disappointed me. And people as a rule are so disappointing! One's friends fall short, one's lover says the wrong thing at the wrong time, or forgets to say the right thing—which is even worse—and one's dearest clergymen and favourite actors and heroes generally make unspeakable fools of themselves just as one is getting ready to fall on one's knees and worship them.
All my life I have asked too much of people and then been left gaping at their unsatisfyingness. So it was no wonder that I was always frankly amazed whenever I stopped to realise that Little Yeogh Wough had always come up to my expectations.
Not that he was ever a prig. Heaven forbid! I would run farther from a prig than from a criminal. He has always had heaps of faults. But they are fine faults. One never rams one's head against a blank wall in him, but always finds deeps and deeps behind.
"That there Master Roland 'ave got so many nooks and corners in his mind that you can't never tell when you've got to the end of 'im," Old Nurse said once, mixing up her words, but showing her meaning plainly enough. "And what I says is, 'e'll go on getting deeper and deeper all his life, till 'e gets into the sincere and yellow leaf, as the Scriptures calls it."
Oh, how his room went on speaking to me of him! Sargent's picture of Carmencita, the Spanish dancer, is over the fireplace, with two fencing foils crossed above it; and above these again is a picture of two stately lovers walking by the shore in Brittany. The table near the foot of the bed had a pile of little military books upon it—"Quick Training for War" and its fellows—and dear little books of poems, and some sheets of his favourite green blotting-paper. He put himself out a good deal to get that green blotting-paper, saying that white showed the ink stains too much, while pink was an abomination, like a red flannel petticoat for a woman or a magenta pelisse for a pallid, blue-eyed child.
The dressing-table drawers were, and still are, full of things that he has no use for at the Front; all except the two small drawers on either side of the looking-glass, which have got a few old letters in them and a few odds and ends of nice things, such as solidified Eau de Cologne and the most deliciously fragrant shaving cream.
Shaving, indeed! Why, he has only done it for a year or so! I am sorry, by the way, that he has got a moustache now. Speaking for myself, I don't like a man with a moustache, except in the capacity of lover. Of course, I hate beards, anyhow. They always make me think of Abraham and Isaac and all those old uninteresting men whom no woman with any romance in her would look at twice, even if it were a case of him and of her being the sole survivors of the human race in the world. By the way, though, I did once see a beard which was attractive—or, more truthfully, was not unattractive. It was a short, silky, auburn beard, torpedo-shaped, and it was on a naval officer who was otherwise so charming that he might perhaps have carried off worse things than this with success. But, coming back to the moustache, it is a fit appendage for a man in the lover stage, because it gives an impression of masculinity. But when a man is my uncle or my father, or simply my friend, and above all, when he is likely to argue much with me, I prefer him to be clean shaven. It gives me a feeling of equality.
When I was a little girl I used to wonder why a man's words, however silly, always seemed to have more importance than a woman's words, however wise; and I satisfied myself that it was because a man's statements nearly always came from under a moustache. Even if he only said how fine the day was, the fact that the remark came from a mouth that had a black or brown or golden porch to it gave it a quite undue amount of weight. On the other hand, when I talk with men whose faces are as hairless as my own, I don't feel that they have any advantage over me. So, as I often have long discussions with Little Yeogh Wough, I felt quite sorry when he had to get a moustache.
Still, he is my Little Yeogh Wough, whose babyish and boyish weaknesses I have known and loved so well.
As I looked more and more round the room, I got more reminders of his small-boyish and babyish times. Under the bed, with several pairs of handsome boots, there was the wreck of an old, squeaky gramophone, and the yet more interesting wreck of a toy typewriter, with which, at the age of eleven, he printed twelve numbers of a monthly home magazine called "The Vallombrosa Record," all by himself. A dusty golliwog and a Teddy bear are jammed in among the ruins of these things, together with a few feathers from the tail of an old life-size cock which used to stand on the night nursery mantelpiece.
I opened the wardrobe. The first thing that my hand touched was a tape-measure, in the shape of a negro's head, with the tape coming out of the mouth. And how this thing brought back to me the Little Yeogh Wough of six and a half years old!
One fine spring morning, my secretary, Miss Torry, had scurried into my study in our London house with this thing in her hand and her face severe.
"Really, you ought to begin training this boy's moral character," said she, speaking with the freedom of one who, though employed by me, was yet older than I. "You see this tape measure. He bought it for a Christmas present for his grand-mamma because he wanted it himself, and he felt quite sure she would give it back to him as soon as she knew he wanted it; but she didn't, and now he's been up there to Hampstead and wheedled it out of her. He's very selfish, you know, and it ought to be nipped in the bud. And he's extravagant with his selfishness—and so cunning, too! Look at the way he came to you yesterday and asked you for a shilling—at his age!—and went out and bought a miserable little peach for tenpence and brought it to you with a great deal of fuss and hung round while you ate it, so that he got you to give him quite nine-tenths of it, and then told you all the evening that he'd made you a present of a peach. Now this is a tendency that ought to be checked. Canon Bloomfield of St. Margaret's says that——"
"It's all right, Miss Torry. The boy is not really cunning, though he seems so. He has a dear little heart, and, in spite of his tricks, he would give his brown velvet eyes right out of his head for me."
I put down the old negro head tape-measure and took up a dark little overcoat dating from the time when he was seven. I had brought it in here out of an old box, meaning to give it away. It was badly cut, and so he had never worn it much; because, even at seven years old, he had known when a coat had no style, and had hated it. Certainly it used to make him—yes, even him—look almost commonplace.
"Fancy the little wretch having known at seven years old whether a thing made him look commonplace or not!" I thought with a laugh as I moved the unsatisfactory garment aside.
He had known at that early age, too, whether my own clothes were satisfactory or not. He had always taken a vivid, throbbing interest in every new garment I had; yes, and in every new yard of ribbon and in every spray of flowers.
"Perhaps it's a good thing he has met Vera and taken a fancy to her, even though he is only a boy still," I said to myself aloud. "Such a fellow as he is might so easily get into trouble with the wrong woman—especially now that he's in khaki. There's so much dash about him. I should fall in love with him myself in five minutes, if I were not his mother."
Falling in love? How absurd it seems in connection with this boy whom I had given to the world, and whose very early boyhood was only such a little way back!
My cook has only been here eight years, and yet she remembers him as quite a small boy. It makes me laugh to think of her amazement when I mention that he has a great friendship for Vera.
"Friendship for a young lady, mum? What? Master Roland? Well, I never did! What the boys is coming to in this war, I don't know. And there's the newspapers all advising 'em to get married before they go out. Mischievous nonsense, I call it. What's the good of getting married to a man who may leave you a widow inside of a month? Two or three girls I know have just done that, for the sake of getting the men's money. Downright mean, I call it, and hard on the taxpayers that have got to keep the soldiers' widows and orphans; and so I told 'em. Of course, it's different for your sort; but it's not right for the likes of us. It's not my idea of gettin' married, anyhow, and so I told my young man when he was going out."
"But wouldn't you feel more sure of him, Joanna, if he'd married you? You see, if he were your husband, and not only just your lover, you'd know that you could trust him out there, and that he wouldn't be flirting with French girls."
But Joanna laughed doubtfully.
"I don't see as that follows, mum. 'Usbands flirts just as much as lovers, from what I've seen. And I'm not afraid of my young man flirting, anyhow, because he isn't the sort. You see, he never calls me darling in his letters, or anything like that. If he was to do that kind of thing, then I should know that he was very likely carrying on with other girls. But he only puts in a 'dear' now and then, and that's the sort that you can trust."
Wise philosopher of the kitchen! If only all women would judge their men as truthfully.
"But to think of Master Roland!" the cook began again.
Yes, to think of Little Yeogh Wough beginning to care for any girl!
As I went on rummaging in the wardrobe, I came across a little loose pile of letters which he had sent back from the Front. I should never dream in the ordinary way of reading anybody else's letters—I carefully avoid looking into his private drawer in this same piece of furniture—but it happens that he told me playfully that I could read any of the letters in this particular little pile, if I chose.
The first two were from myself to him. Of course I might look at those.
They bore signs of violent usage in the opening. I have a habit of fastening down the flaps of my envelopes with stickphast, and then making them still more secure by sitting on the letters in a book. So Little Yeogh Wough had often told me that, whenever he saw a letter of mine arriving, he sent his soldier servant for an entrenching tool to open it with.
Not that he had any right to tease me on this matter. For he followed the same plan himself in fastening letters. He always used stickphast and he always sat on the missives in a book.
Whenever we bought a book that we did not enjoy, we took it to sit on as a correspondence flattener.
"Don't you ever believe anybody who says they've opened by mistake any letter that you'd written," Little Yeogh Wough said to me once. "It's a sheer impossibility."
The letter from myself to him, which I had just taken up, was one which he had marked to be put away later on in his despatch box for permanent safe keeping. I recognise it as one that I had written at a time when I knew he was in particular danger. Vera had made him promise that when there was going to be a great "push," or when any other circumstances arose which materially increased the ordinary risk to his life, he would send her a certain short Latin sentence. In an hour of crisis he had sent this sentence, and the anxious girl, who thought of him all day and dreamed of him all night, had passed on the warning to me.
A chill ran through my blood as I re-read my own written words:
"Monday, 27th Sept., 1915.
"My own sweet Little Yeogh Wough,—
"The news from the French front this morning filled us with joy. For a moment I positively danced. All those thousands of German prisoners meant so much! And then a horrible thought came to me that it must mean worse danger for you; and now a letter from Vera says that you have sent her a few words—of which Big Yeogh Wough is perhaps a little jealous—to say that the posts will be stopped very soon.
"This strikes me as very significant. It would have given me a danger signal, even apart from that 'short Latin sentence' which I hear you have also sent.
"Dearest, your Big Yeogh Wough, who has always been so proud of you ever since you have been born, is prouder of you than ever now. She is glad you are where your duty of honour and manhood demand that you should be. You are fighting, not only for us and all that we glory in, but for those who have died—and who are all your brothers, whether they were peers or privates. I feel at this moment that I should like to go the round of the whole army and kiss them every one—but keeping always a special kiss for you.
"But this pride and this gladness don't prevent me from being on the rack. I have been troubled for some days past; and I should have written to you several times during this interval in which I have been silent, if it were not that I have been much more than usually occupied with the delicate steering of things in general. But always my heart and my thoughts are with you, my very precious boy. I only wish my love could be of use as a talisman, to guard you against all the dangers.
"Your always devoted, in all lives through which we may pass,
"Big Yeogh Wough.
"Your cake will be sent off to you to-day. The Bystander has just written to you."
Ah, thank God! He came safely through that time of extra-acute peril. If he had not come through it—what sort of human wreck should I be now?
I shivered as I put the letter down with fingers that were not quite steady.
Then I took up another letter from the pile—a letter with a London postmark and with a Hammersmith address for its heading.
"What a common-looking, sloppy handwriting!" I thought as I looked at it.
And the thing began:
"You dear pigeon of a Roly."
And it was signed:
"Your duck of a Queenie."
And underneath the "Queenie" there were actually crosses for kisses, as if the letter were from a tweenymaid!
I got a shock. Shivers went down my back. What vulgar creature could this be who had dared to make so free with the purest-minded and least vulgar boy in all the world? Who was she that had taken advantage of him like this, just because he was at large and in khaki?
I know exactly the kind of woman this is.
Even in my indignation, I could not help half-smiling as I remembered certain angry complaints made by a fashionable mother whom I had met at a War charity meeting.
"It really is a shame that you can't let your fresh-minded boy go out into the world without his coming across snare-laying women," she had burst out confidentially. "The poor silly fellows get quite led astray by some of these girls that they meet where they're billeted—shoddy girls with a cheap prettiness and cheap little openwork stockings and flashy haircombs, and imitation jewellery, and no minds or souls. You know the sort. They're always hankering after small outings and excitements, and, of course, they would all like to catch baby second lieutenants, who may one day be something in the world."
She had been so much upset, this fashionable mother, that I knew she must have suffered.
"What a pity that this 'Queenie' of Hammersmith doesn't know better when she's wasting her time!" I thought. "Why couldn't she see that her 'Roly' might love a woman a hundred times worse than she is, but he wouldn't love her? Anyhow, he ought to have burnt her silly letter. I will see that he burns it when he comes back. I will not have such stuff defiling this consecrated room.... And yet—I wonder if it is the same charm in him that makes both Queenie and me adore him!"
For it was certainly not because he was my son that I was wrapped up in him.
"Why ever do you think such a heap of me?" he had asked me more than once. And I had always answered him:
"Because, my boy, you are that strangest and most wonderful thing in all the world—an interesting young man. As a rule, the masculine person isn't worth taking the least notice of till he's thirty—except for athletics. I put that down in a diary once when I was a little girl and I should put the same thing down now. It quite takes one's breath away to find a boy who is athletic and fascinating at the same time. One feels that a drum ought to be beaten through the town. Do you know, you will even be one of the few persons whose weddings are not dull. And weddings, as a rule, are the dullest things that ever happen."
I had spoken so lightly and yet I had meant every word that I had said.
No, I need not be afraid that any of the shoddy, mean-souled women of this world will ever have much chance with a boy of his sort. And if, indeed, he really and deeply loves Vera Brennan, the dream-figure with the amethyst eyes, then she is very much to be envied of other girls.
Was it for her that he had written the little poem which came to my hand at this moment among the letters, and of which he had sent one copy to her and one to me?
He had written it in Ploegsteert Wood soon after he had gone out to the Front, and the lines were as sad and as sweet as the little dark blue flowers that had made them well up out of his heart:
"Your dear, far, forgetting land!"
Oh, the reproach in those words! And do we not, most of us, deserve that reproach?
I took out his sword from the drawer in which I had wrapped it away in silk, and I very nearly bowed myself before it in my passion of reverence.
Strange! That one should regard as so sacred a thing that is meant to kill!
Of all such things, it is only the sword that is held holy. Nobody reverences a revolver, while a dagger is mean and sly and a rifle is nothing in particular, like a gardening tool. But a sword is a glory and a joy, and now, as I handled the sword of the boy of my heart, I could have laughed for sheer delight in all the splendid things that it stood for.
What a pity that it should have become a mere show thing, wanted only on parade and never taken out to the Front!
As I stood holding the sword, my husband came into the room with a newspaper in his hand. He is a man who can hardly ever be seen without a newspaper in his hand. But this time his face showed that something new and grave had happened.
"Gretton is dead," he announced to me. "He was killed by a shell at Festubert five days ago."
I caught my breath sharply as my eyes met his.
"Gretton?" I exclaimed; and my voice sounded thin in my own ears.
"Yes." My husband nodded jerkily. "I don't really like telling you about it, but this comes rather strangely on the top of ugly dreams I've had lately. I dreamt four times last week that I saw Roland and Gretton coming along arm in arm, laughing together, but looking more like upright dead men than living flesh and blood. And the queer thing about it was that, though they were laughing together, Roland was trying to get away from Gretton, and somehow he couldn't. It was as if something that was stronger than their own will kept them close to each other. There was something horrible about it."
I knew that the blood was leaving my cheeks and lips as I looked at him. And yet this boy Gretton was a person whom I had never spoken to in my life!
For the first time for nearly three months, I felt a deadly chill run through me again, just as when Little Yeogh Wough had first gone out to the Front.
"Do you know, I can't help feeling troubled about this?" I heard myself saying in a strange whisper. "It is very silly of me, but I can't help feeling that—that Gretton may be calling to him to follow."
It was not so mad a thing as it seemed, this fear that had just come to me that the boy Gretton, killed five days ago, might be calling to the boy of my heart.
Their lives had been linked together in a most curious way. They had never had any particular liking for each other—indeed, it must have been almost the other way about, for Little Yeogh Wough had never brought him to us or gone to his home—and yet in their careers they had been as brother spirits.
They had both opened their eyes on life in the same year and month, and within a stone's throw of each other in London. They had both been given the Christian name of Roland, spelt without a "w."
They met by going to the same preparatory school, and from the hour of this first meeting their lives had run side by side. They had not run quite neck and neck, for Little Yeogh Wough was always ahead. He got a seventy-pound scholarship for a certain great Public School, when Gretton won a fifty-pound one.
It was the same with Oxford, for which they both gained classical scholarships. Little Yeogh Wough was always well ahead. Yet, still, they were always together.
When the war had come, they had got their commissions at the same time. But Gretton had got out to the Front first.
"I shall get out soon now that Gretton's out there," Little Yeogh Wough had said to me confidently.
And he had gone soon, and they had fought the Germans side by side, as they had fought for honours at school. And now Gretton had been killed, and my husband had dreamed that he saw him walking with our Roland, arm linked in arm, holding on to him closely and refusing to let him go.
"I am a fool to think anything of a dream," I told myself angrily, trying to thrust away from me the grey spectre of Fear that had risen up before me suddenly in the pale winter sunlight. "After all, what is a dream? It's a thing that never comes to a person in perfect health—except once in a way, when one happens to be awakened about half an hour before one's proper time and then goes off into a doze. And then, there is Little Yeogh Wough's lucky white lock. That will keep him from being killed. He will get badly wounded, I dare say, but not killed—no, certainly, not killed."
I have not mentioned the boy's lucky white lock of hair before. It was a queer little white patch in among the gold, just over his left ear.
It was Gretton who, when they went to school first, had called Little Yeogh Wough a sixpenny-halfpenny Golliwog.
"That comes of doin' things by 'alves with Master Roland's 'air," Old Nurse had ventured to air her opinions. "What I do say is, if you've got to cut a boy's curls off, why, you'd better cut 'em off, and not 'ave bits of 'em left 'anging. Of course, it's a shame, but boys 'as got to be boys, and you can't 'ave 'em goin' to school lookin' like them little Cupids in the pictures."
"It's true that an aureole of golden curls doesn't look very well coming out from under a bowler hat," I said to myself. Have you ever noticed that there's hardly one grown-up man in a hundred that can ever look decent in a bowler? A man has either to be very neat-featured or else very ugly to carry off that sort of hat.
"Them there bowlers is all the go for little boys of Master Roland's age, and 'is suits 'im right enough, only 'e chooses to think as it don't, and you listens to 'im," went on the worthy old woman. "'Pon my word, that there boy's vanity do beat anything I ever come across in all my life. Every time that I makes 'im put that bowler on, 'e gets into such a temper as you never saw. 'E thinks as people laughs at 'im for it, but if they does laugh, it's at 'is fatness, not at his 'at."
"That's because all the rest of them are such skeletons," I rejoined. "Any boy with any flesh on his bones at all would look fat compared with them. People are so silly about thinness and fatness. They always think of what they look like dressed, and never of what they look like undressed. Why, half the women who go about with a reputation for slimness and elegance would give one a start if one saw their blade bones uncovered! And it's the same with children."
"That may be, ma'am, but it don't do away with the fact that these children is all so enormous that people opens their eyes wide whenever they sees 'em a-comin'. As for Master Roland, I've given 'im up. 'E 'ad the coolness to say to me to-day as my 'air was going greyer. I told 'im that at my time of life people 'as either to 'ave their 'air go grey or else come off, and they aren't given their choice."
"I suppose you'd rather have your hair absent and black than present and grey," I answered her without thinking what I was saying.
"Little Yeogh Wough, you're a very small child still; but I think you'll understand me when I tell you that you've got to a time in your life when you'll have to be very careful about holding on to beauty," I said to the Boy that night when I went in to see him and to have the talk which was as regular as the coming of the night itself. "A girl can keep her ideas of beauty always, but a boy is supposed to drop his when he begins going to school. It's not only the cutting off of yellow curls that I'm thinking of, but other things, too. You'll have to hide your great love for flowers and colour and poetry."
He looked puzzled.
"Mustn't I bring you flowers any more, Big Yeogh Wough?" he laughed then.
"Oh, yes, of course! You can show your love for beautiful things just as much at home as ever. That's the best side of you. But you must not talk about it to the boys, because they wouldn't understand. I'll show you what I mean by telling you of something that your father and I saw when we were in Paris last. We happened to go into a fashionable tea-shop, and there we saw, sitting with his mother, a boy who must have been eleven or twelve years old, in a white satin suit complete and with hair as long as a girl's hanging down his back, tied in with white satin ribbon. Now, you know, we English believe that a boy had better be dead than be like that. Even I think so. Of course, he was like a little prince in a fairy tale, but everyday life isn't a fairy tale, and we don't consider white satin and long hair manly. So it's in order to prevent anybody from thinking that you've got any taint of unmanliness about you that you must make up your mind now to give up pretty things for yourself and go in for boyish plainness, and cricket and football. No one must ever think you soft and flabby."
"I don't think anybody will ever do that," he laughed again. "I knocked one of the boys down to-day for being impudent to me. He was a good deal bigger than I am; so it's done me a lot of good with the others."
I took one of his small, strong hands and clasped it in mine and held it against my breast.
"Was this the little hand that did it?" I laughed. "Because, if so, that is splendid. Those boys must have seen that golden curls and big soft brown eyes can have a good deal of manly strength behind them; and people will always respect your brains, and even your longings for the pretty things of life, as long as they know you're strong enough to knock them down if you want to. But you must only use your strength against others who are just as strong. You must never use it against your little sister and brother. Nurse says you have been behaving badly in the nursery this evening—interfering with the others instead of doing your home-work. Why haven't you done your preparation?"
"Why, because the master that's got to see my home-work won't be at school to-morrow, so it would have been all a waste. The other boys said they weren't going to do theirs."
"And what difference does it make to you whether they do theirs or not? How does it alter your duty? Why should you cheat yourself because they are silly enough to cheat themselves?"
The big brown eyes looked at me blankly. I went on:
"Don't you see, Little Yeogh Wough, that it's only yourself that you cheat when you don't do your work? It's not your master. It doesn't matter to him. He doesn't lose anything. It's you who lose. You've cheated yourself this evening of something that you might have had. And you haven't been thorough. If you neglect your work often like this, you'll get to slurring it over when you do it, so long as you think nobody will notice the slurring; and that won't do. That will make you grow up just like most of the other men you see around you, and not the great, strong, wonderful man that I want you to be."
He patted my face and neck with the hand that I had left free, as I knelt by the bedside.
"You funny Big Yeogh Wough! Nobody would expect anyone who looks like you to talk like that," he said mischievously.
"You wise little boy!" I laughed. "No, I suppose they wouldn't. People always make mistakes like that, you know. One day the world will come to see that preachers may look very bright and easy-going—just as motherly women with mob caps and three chins are not necessarily the best persons to trust to for seeing that sheets are properly aired. Now, good night. You must go to sleep."
I went to the window and opened it, placed the screen by his bed just where it would shield him from the draught and from the light, and went towards the door. As I reached it, he called me back.
"Mother, do you think we shall ever have a war with Germany?"
"A war with Germany? Why, yes, I suppose we are pretty sure to have one some day. But whatever makes you ask that now?"
"Oh, it was only because I heard one of the masters talking about it!"
"Well, I don't think you need trouble about it just yet, anyhow. The best thing you can do is to sleep well and eat well and work well, so as to grow up a fine man and be able to do something worth doing in that war when it comes—if it ever does come."
When I had left him I stood for some minutes shaking the door gently to make sure that it was properly shut and that he would not be in a draught all night.
I've always had this curious difficulty in realising actual things, such as whether I have shut a door or not, or whether I have put a jewel away in its case properly. It has always been quite easy for me to realise unseen things—such as a death or a fire that has not yet occurred, or any sort of scene at which I have not been present. I am sure that I sometimes see these more vividly than people who have actually witnessed them with their bodily eyes. But when it comes to ordinary everyday facts—why, I have stood irresolutely by a trunk ten or fifteen minutes many and many a time, lifting the lid up and down in order to make absolutely sure that something that I had put away in under the lid was actually there and had not jumped out again.
It was in this pernickety way (the word is beautifully expressive) that I always guarded Little Yeogh Wough.
People accused me of only loving him so desperately because he was good-looking. I dare say his looks went some little way with me. I have never pretended that I should devote myself to a person with a hare lip as well as to a person without one; and certainly the boy of my heart, besides being glorious to look at, had a knack of making people surround him with attractive things that added to his own attractiveness. Whenever he went into a shop to have some plain and practical article bought for him, he managed to choose for himself an idealised example of the same thing, at quite double the suggested price, and have it sent in. Prices meant nothing to him, and at the age of seven he was not half so good a financier as his sister of four.
"That there boy 'ull never 'ave a penny in 'is pocket in all 'is life, not even if he gets thousands a year," Old Nurse was accustomed to say to my secretary, who was a willing listener. "Money burns 'oles with 'im, wherever he carries it."
"Oh yes, Nurse. But he always spends it on his mother. Look at the flowers he buys her—violets and carnations, all through the winter, and even roses! That's really wonderful, you know, Nurse, in the present day, when children are so selfish."
"M'yes," rejoined Old Nurse doubtfully. "But what do 'e do it for? It's just jealousy; that's what it is, just jealousy, so as nobody else shan't give 'is mother anything. Why, there was Miss Clare yesterday, she spent 'er week's pocket money buyin' some roses for 'er mother, and 'e 'appened to meet us comin' home with 'em when he was walkin' up the road with a schoolboy, and what did he do, d'you think? Why, he ran as 'ard as he could and bought some carnations and got 'ome with them first and gave them to 'is mother; and when the poor little girl got in with 'er roses, she was thanked for 'em, of course, but they wasn't worn or put on the study table. They was just put away in the back drawing-room, where nobody never goes."
"Ah, that's it, you see!" said Miss Torry. "But, of course, Nurse, the little girl ought to have told exactly what had happened."
"That's what I said to 'er, but she wouldn't do it. She's shy. And that there Master Roland, 'e do override everything and everybody. He's that spoiled that there's no——"
"Oh, come now, Nurse, you're as bad as everybody else with him! You always say he's charming."
"Well, so 'e is. I will say this for 'im—that he never gives me a back answer. That there Miss Clare, she could 'old 'er own so far as tongue goes with an East-End street child. Master Roland, 'e corrects her for it. 'E says: 'Now, Clare, you mustn't speak like that to Nurse.' Then he told 'er as somebody called George Meredith, that their mother thinks a lot of, said he wanted 'em all to be polite above all things."
"That's it, you see," said Miss Torry again. She was a delightful creature, but she always felt rather uncomfortable under Old Nurse's severe eye.
It has always been a mystery to me why I am supposed to have spoiled Little Yeogh Wough. My hand was always over him, invisibly keeping him down. He had more punishments than the others had. But he had a charm that took the sternness out of discipline and a wonderful knack of knowing the right thing to say, and when to say it. And he knew how to give way with a quite princely grace.
"Roland," I said to him one day, rejoining him in the car in which he had been waiting for me outside a house where I had been paying a formal call. "I have just heard someone say a very silly thing. She—it was a woman—said how much more right and proper it would be if the words under the Prince of Wales's feathers were: 'I rule,' instead of 'I serve.' You can see the silliness of that, can't you?"
He nodded. "You told me one day that 'I serve' is much grander."
"Of course it is. Any empty-headed cock on a dirt heap can crow out 'I rule,' and it doesn't mean anything much; but it takes a great man to say 'I serve,' and when a great man does say it you feel that he's a king. You know, Little Yeogh Wough, empty show doesn't mean much. We're very fond of beautiful things, you and I, but——"
"Oh, yes!" he put in. "That's why I asked you to let me come with you to-day, because it was the first time you were wearing your new hat."
"Yes. Beautiful things are very nice indeed, but they don't mean much. You don't remember, do you, when we took you to the South of France and we saw Queen Victoria arrive at Nice? We were in a crowd of French people and they were talking about the Queen and saying what a mighty woman she was—Empress of India, and all the rest of it. And then she came—a little figure in a plain, ugly black dress, and with what you would have called a plain, ugly old black bonnet on. She wasn't helped by her clothes a bit; and yet there was something about her that was so great and so masterful that a hush went through that French crowd, and I knew that every man and woman in it felt what I felt myself—that here was a human creature so truly queenly and so truly grand, that laces and furs and jewels would have spoiled her."
I saw the big brown eyes that were fronting mine suddenly soften and glow.
"I like a queen better than a king," he said now. "I should like to fight for you if you were a queen."
It was considered to be a part of my steady spoiling of Little Yeogh Wough that, while he was still only seven years old, I sent for him to come over to us in Paris, where we were staying for three months at the Hôtel Meurice.
As a matter of fact, it was in order that he might not be utterly spoiled that I sent for him. I had very strong doubts as to the discipline that was being kept up at the London house by the old Nurse, under the supervision of my sweet-natured, but too gentle and yielding, aunt.
"I don't suppose we shall know him for the same boy when he gets out here," I said to Miss Torry, who was with us. "My aunt, you know, is one of those dear women who always let in thin ends of wedges all round them, and she will have had time in a fortnight to let in a good many in his daily life."
My secretary looked grieved.
"Oh, but you must have more confidence in him than that! He's so fine a character, even though he is only seven years old, that I don't think he will have changed just because he may have been differently handled. Besides, he does worship you so much. He wouldn't do anything to vex you for the world."
"I don't know. I think it was a little dangerous of me yesterday to tell those French people what a wonderful boy he is. For one thing, it's always silly to praise one's own children; and secondly, it's a mistake to praise anything or anybody to people who haven't seen them yet. You must not even give praise that is solidly true, because, if you do, something always happens to make it false. You say your child has a skin as clear as the may-flower, and by the time you show him up he's developed pimples. It's the law of Compensation again. It acts in little things just as in big ones. Anyhow, the boy is sure to have sincere eyes and a sincere walk, and these two things will go a long way. So very few people have sincere movements! You've only to look around this hotel to see that."
"I only hope he'll get here safely!" breathed Miss Torry, who was always on the look out for disasters. "He's coming over with an irresponsible sort of man, and accidents do happen so easily that in the present day one can't be too careful. A precious child like that ought to be looked after by somebody that can be trusted. Mr. P—— can't be trusted. Why, don't you remember, he took his own two-year-old child for a drive somewhere on the East Coast last summer and it fell out of the old victoria without his knowing it, and he'd left it on the roadside quite a mile behind him before he missed it?"
Yes, this was true. I had forgotten this incident, and her recalling it to my mind made me anxious. Still, this Mr. P—— had happened to be coming over to Paris on purpose to see me on some business matter, and the temptation to let him bring out the boy of my heart had been too strong to resist.
Besides, the sight of Paris would do much to help forward Little Yeogh Wough's education.
"How sorry he'll be to find you so ill and unlike yourself!" went on Miss Torry. (I had a cold so bad that it had practically become bronchitis, which, for some mysterious reason, usually happens to me in Paris.) "But how delighted he'll be with your new black and white frock, and with the hat with violets!"
Yes. Even at that early age he loved my clothes. He loved them so much that I used sometimes to wonder if all his devotion to myself would go if I were shabby and lived in sordid surroundings. As it is, I ask myself now, in these later days, whom I should dress for if he should be killed in the war.
His father has the kind of devotion that is not exacting about clothes, and would burn with as steady a flame if its idol were in sacking as if she wore the most marvellous confections of the French man-dressmakers.
My racking fits of coughing would not let me go to the station to meet my treasure; but I dressed myself with as much care to be beheld by him as if he had been a grown man. I wonder how many mothers put themselves out to cultivate beauty for the satisfaction of sons of not yet eight years old?
But the beauty cultivation was all on my side this time. For when he appeared, marshalled by his father and by the friend who had brought him over, he wore his little bowler and a badly cut, dark overcoat that he disliked, and his face was so sullen that the sight of him gave me a shock.
"Nurse said I must wear this coat, and Auntie said so, too," he complained, as he struggled out of the objectionable garment after duly removing his still more objectionable headgear. "I've got a cap in my pocket that I wore coming over in the boat, but they told me I must put the bowler on again when I got to the station here. And I nearly didn't get here at all. I nearly fell out of the train."
"Nearly fell out of the train?"
"Lor'!" exclaimed Miss Torry, throwing up her hands. "I knew something was going to happen. Whatever was it?"
The friend who had brought the boy began to explain, with a miserable sense of guilt. He had dropped asleep in the train on the way to Paris, and Little Yeogh Wough, wanting to explore the corridor, had opened a door which he thought led out into it, but which was really on the opposite side and only led out on to the railway track and into the void of the night. He had been in the very act of stepping down out of the train, which was going at seventy-five miles an hour, when a Frenchman sitting in the compartment jumped up and sprang forward and clutched at him—saving him by a second's space only from what must have been certain death!
Strange! To think as I look back now that, by this act of saving an English child, that unknown Frenchman saved a soldier who was to help to defend France against the next great onslaught of the Germans!
"I told you so," said Miss Torry to my husband and me, when our unlucky friend had retired to get ready for dinner. "I told you that man wasn't a fit person to have the charge of a child—and such a child as that. What a mercy that Frenchman had his wits about him! One can't be too careful whom one trusts children with in the present day."
"And I told you that the boy would be changed," I said to her in a low voice, so that Little Yeogh Wough, who had run into the next room, might not hear. "He's not my boy at all. The difference is perfectly amazing."
Miss Torry threw up her hands again.
"That's it, you see. I knew how it would be directly he got under your aunt's influence. I knew she'd let him have his way in everything. And Old Nurse, too! I always did feel that it's never any good trusting anybody who's got a long upper lip. Well, now I'll go and see that he washes his face and hands properly. He actually hasn't said yet that he's sorry you've got such a dreadful cold. I'll tell him what I think of him."
And she whisked into the inner room.
"I believe a good deal of his disagreeableness comes from that overcoat," I said to my husband. "He feels that he's looking his worst in it, and he can't be himself when he feels that. It's all Old Nurse's fault. She said he'd better not have a fawn cloth one, because his vanity must be checked at any cost."
Ah! The dear boy! How vain he was when he first put on his khaki eleven years afterwards!
When his bedtime came, on this his first evening in Paris, he did not get up to say good night when told to do so.
"Roland, I told you to go to bed. Did you hear me? Put your things away at once."
He lifted his big brown eyes with rebellion showing in them for the first time in his life.
"Auntie doesn't mind whether I go to bed when she tells me to or not."
"Oh, doesn't she? I see it was time I had you brought over here. You will put your things away instantly and go to bed."
Clearly he knew the something in my voice which told him that obedience would be enforced at once and to the uttermost. And he rose and went.
And yet people have always accused me of spoiling him!
"You see, Little Yeogh Wough," I explained to him in one of our good-night talks more than a week later. "I want you to grow up to be a real man, and not a sham one. That is why you must obey. Suppose, when you grow up, you became a soldier—an officer—and you were ordered to take your men to a certain spot on a battlefield by a certain time, and you said to yourself in a slouchy way that a minute late in starting or arriving wouldn't matter. Well, then, do you know what would happen? Things would go wrong in that battle, and very likely your men would be shot down by the guns of your own people; because, you see, the order would have been given to fire just when you were due to have cleared out of a certain place—and if you haven't cleared out you yourself are to blame for any mischief that is done. And it's the same in life. There's a plan in everything, if you look for it, and if we are disobedient and don't keep time, we put that plan all wrong."
But that first night I did not have a good-night talk with him at all. He did not ask me to come and see him in bed, though before I left home he had been heartbroken at the prospect of my nightly talks with him being interrupted. For a further and shocking proof of his new naughtiness had come to light.
Miss Torry, searching in the pockets of his inelegant and despised overcoat, had pulled forth something which drew from her a louder "Lor'!" than ever I had heard her utter before. She held the something up and revealed a long thick tress of coppery brown hair.
"Roland!" I exclaimed. "What is that?"
"It's a piece of Clare's hair," he told us, at once and quite frankly. Even in his worst moods I never knew him tell an untruth. "I cut it off just before I came away from home, so I hadn't time to put it anywhere but in my pocket. I did it because she wouldn't let me do cooking on her toy kitchen range, that works with methylated spirit. I just got my scissors quickly and cut it. Nobody knew I did it, though I dare say Nurse has found out by now."
"Oh, Roland!"
My reproachful exclamation was accompanied by a stream of reproaches from the horrified Miss Torry. I remembered then that all through his few short years hitherto Little Yeogh Wough had shown a great interest in cooking. And he had never even seen the kitchen, or any part of the basement, of his London home yet. He had called the basement "Griffiths's Dark," when he was two and a half, because Griffiths was the name of the cook who reigned there at that time; and the name had stuck. We had all spoken of the basement ever since as "Griffiths's Dark."
And so his curious leanings towards cooking had led him to such a breach of good conduct as the cutting off of a goodly portion of his four-and-a-half-year-old sister's hair because she would not let him use her toy range with methylated spirit!
In very deed he had fallen from grace during this fortnight of lax discipline.
"Roland," I said, "I would give you a whipping for this if I had actually caught you doing it, or had been told of it at once. But, as things are, I will punish you in another way. I will not come and see you in bed for a whole week. I am very much hurt indeed. I did not think you could ever behave so badly."
He said nothing. But his lips quivered and his eyes filled with tears.
He was to sleep in a little room opening out of mine and his father's. I meant at first not to go in there at all, but on second thoughts I simply went in and saw that his bedclothes were properly arranged. I did not say a second good night to him, but came away as if the person in the bed were a total stranger to me.
"Are you going so soon?" His voice came after me rather piteously. "Aren't you going to talk to me?"
"Not to-night, Roland. You know that, because I said so. You must go to sleep now."
"Won't you call me Little Yeogh Wough?" he persisted wistfully.
"No. You're not Little Yeogh Wough to-night. You're not the same boy that I left when I came away from home. You're only Roland. I don't know how it is. You used to keep your true self when you went away from me, but this time you've lost it. I suppose a fortnight has been too long. Now go to sleep!"
"They've taken all the romance out of him," I said to Miss Torry, when I got back to the sitting-room.
"Lor'!" she exclaimed. And up went her hands again until she looked like a surprised angel. "The things that are going on in that house! They've got the puppies all indoors, messing up the whole place; and the cook's given notice, because Roland has been up into her room and made her window so that it won't shut—in this weather, too!—because he wanted to rig up a toy telephone between there and one of the servants' room windows in the next house. He says the boy next door is allowed to do what he likes, so he doesn't see why he himself shouldn't be. Did you ever hear of such a thing?"
"Well, you'll have to take him out of my way to-morrow, Miss Torry. Take him round and show him Paris. I'll work by myself. Strange, that he should have altered so much in a fortnight! But that's just because he's not commonplace. Commonplace people can't rise, but they can't sink, either. It takes a person with something great in him to get down low."
So Little Yeogh Wough was taken by Miss Torry round Paris, and he also went with me into shops and to do business in post offices, and quite learned the ways of the place and of the people. But it made my cold worse.
"Never mind," I said. "My having a bad cold like this means that my new photographs will be good. I always pay for a good photograph with an illness. I know I should pay for a good oil-painting portrait with my death."
Little Yeogh Wough wrote and told my dear friend Mrs. Croy how he was getting on. And Mrs. Croy responded by sending coals to Newcastle in the shape of an enormous box of chocolates.
Mrs. Croy was a really darling creature of eighty-nine who dressed with a view to looking nineteen, and she had a high opinion of Little Yeogh Wough because, as she said, he was the only child living who had been nice to her.
The fact of the matter was, that she was a difficult person for a child to be "nice" to, for the reason that she apparently did her making-up without looking in the glass, and so was often to be found with an eyebrow coming down one side of her cheek and some rouge on her chin or on her forehead. Irreverent children had been accustomed to make remarks on these peculiarities, as also on the fact that the colour of her wig changed every day; but the boy of my heart, who liked her, would not have appeared to notice the matter if she had come before him without her head. And for this she was so grateful that she loved him passionately.
I loved her, too. It is astonishing how lovable women who make up badly usually are.