It was astonishing, too, how much Little Yeogh Wough loved women. He loved everybody and everything, for that matter, with a great and deep love and sympathy; such a love and sympathy as led him, for instance, to get out of his warm little bed one gloomy and bone-chilling morning of a London winter and labour for hours in the sodden garden to get into shelter some newly born puppies who were exposed to the icy rain. But most of all he loved women.
He loved them in a tender, caressing, worshipping way, and he loved everything connected with them; frocks, hats, dainty shoes and long suède gloves, beautiful furs and scents, and pots of powder and sweet-smelling soaps and creams. He could never understand how the ordinary boy did not care for these things. He liked to go out shopping with me more than almost anything else in the world, and he hated it when his regular day-school life prevented him from doing so.
"He won't be one of the men who are not interesting to talk to until they are thirty," I said to Miss Torry many a time as the months passed and I saw his character shaping itself. "If he goes on as he's doing now he'll be a most fascinating man with women, even in his early twenties."
"That's what I'm always telling people," replied my secretary. "And he'll be very manly with it. I can't understand how it is some people can't think a boy manly unless he's always stumping about in the thickest boots and talking about cricket and football."
"Oh, they're all manly!" I said. "But I always think the refined and clever ones are really the manliest and bravest. Just as it is always the people brought up in luxury that can live a rough life most successfully. A man came to me the other day and said he wanted to marry, but he didn't want to choose a lady because he was going out to Canada and he wanted to rough it; and I told him that he was making a mistake and that if he really wanted somebody who would do hard and even degrading work he must get a lady above all things, and that the more softly brought up she'd been the better she'd do the nastiest jobs. You can never get a servant to clean up after a dog, but you'll see duchesses doing it by the dozen at fashionable dog shows. And boys and men are like that. It isn't always the hulking footballer who will volunteer first to lead a forlorn hope."
The night on which, at the Paris hotel, I said Yes once more to Little Yeogh Wough's cry of: "Come and see me in bed, mother!" is a night which I shall never forget.
There was gaiety all round us in the great building, from whose courtyard there came up to us sounds of voices and laughter mingling with the roll of carriages and the clatter of cars. But we were too happy to be gay. Our heads were resting on the same pillow and the boy of my heart was patting my cheek with one small, but very strong and brown hand.
"It's so nice to have you come in and talk to me again, Big Yeogh Wough," he said a little tremblingly.
"Yes. It is very nice," I agreed. "You won't drive me away from you again, will you?"
"No. I'll be good. It's been perfectly beastly having you angry with me. And to-morrow you'll let me buy you some flowers, won't you? I've got enough of my pocket money to buy some tulips. Oh, it's very early for them, I know, and they'll cost a lot; but it pays to get them, because they die so prettily. Other flowers look ugly when they're dying, but tulips don't."
"That's their Compensation for looking vulgar when they're alive," thought I. But I did not say so.
And then we began to sing together, very low, a little song of the French navy, which I had taught him a few months before.
Oh, the joyous freedom and swing that he put into that song—he, a small child, lying there in bed and singing!
Two or three months later, when we had left Paris and were at home again in London, I got an example of his courage.
Ever since he had been going to school and so had been out of reach of the care of nurses, he had had cold after cold. Much good did it do for me to live a life of perpetual watchfulness in the house, taking care that he should get continual fresh air without any draughts, when at his school there was no watch kept and he was allowed to sit for hours between two open windows, or between an open window and an open door! So the colds went on into tonsilitis, and at last he was very ill and had to have a serious operation.
The anæsthetist who came from one of the London hospitals to administer the chloroform was a man with one of the gentlest and kindest of faces, and yet somehow Little Yeogh Wough, though he had been told nothing, knew from the first that this man's coming boded him no good. He ran to me to protect him, showing an infinite trust in me that in a way was heart-breaking. And then I realised that for the first time a situation had come about in which I could not help him, but in which he had to face whatever there might be of pain and risk quite alone and unhelped, like a grown man.
I told him this, and for a moment his brown wistful eyes met mine with a look in them which I shall never forget. Then he turned and went over to the table that had been made ready for the operation, and lay down upon it, saying quietly:
"I'm quite ready."
That is the way in which he will meet torture and death if they come to him before his part in this war is over. He will steady the shrinking of his sensitive nerves and will look at the danger and measure it and then say bravely: "Now let come what has to come. I am quite ready."
Oh, if I could have foreseen in those days how much of pain and terror would face him in the years to come that I could not save him from!
It happened often just then that the children made railway journeys on which I did not accompany them. I ought to have felt a sense of domestic freedom at their going—for I am a person who hates a home to be an establishment, full of children and servants and expenses—but instead of this, tremors used to seize upon me as to what might happen. For Little Yeogh Wough in particular I was afraid, as he was the sensitive one. The idea of his being at the mercy of horses or motor-cars or the mechanism of a train was horrible to me.
His sister, aged five, always gave people the impression that she could look after herself in any circumstances. His younger brother, aged two, was a baby still. But Little Yeogh Wough himself, all wistfulness and appealing grace, with the haunting sadness always in his brown eyes—what would his sufferings be if any accident brought harm to him and I was not there?
I used at these times to go to the piano and play to myself in order to drive away my fears. I played dance music and coon songs, though I ought to have known that these are the saddest things in the world—far sadder than any Dead Marches in Saul. I can hear myself now singing: "The Lonesome Coon":
Then I stopped, with my fingers on the keys of the piano, and thought:
"What if indeed there were a railway accident and he were killed? How should I bear it?"
And then I found myself singing something else:
"Yes," I went on thinking, "after all, if he were killed in a railway accident or in some other sudden way, I should at least never have to feel afraid of anything for him again. I should not have to wonder how he would front the world if anything were to happen to his father and to me. I should know that the brave little heart and the joyous little soul behind the sad brown eyes were safe."
But what was the use of giving myself over like this to the worship of a child?
It was a good thing for me that just about this time he began to get more matter-of-fact. Anyhow, he was less of a picture and more of an ordinary rascal of a boy when, soon after his thirteenth birthday, we took him with us on a little journey by sea to Russia.
The reason for his looking less like a picture was that for two or three months he had to wear glasses. The beautiful brown velvet eyes, with their curling dark lashes, were not strong.
I wonder why it is that spectacles spoil the look of ninety-nine faces out of a hundred, whereas pince-nez give an air of style and importance?
Pince-nez make a poor man look well off, while spectacles, even with gold rims, can always be thoroughly depended on to make a multi-millionaire look poor. On the other hand, spectacles are honest, while eye-glasses suggest sharpness in the ways of the world and much toughness of conscience. Nothing could ever make me believe that a man who wears pince-nez has really repented of his sins.
With women, of course, it is not quite the same. No woman, however big a fool she might be, would ever take even to pince-nez with a view to improving her personal appearance.
It was partly to comfort Little Yeogh Wough for his mortification at having to wear spectacles for a time that we yielded to his appeal that he might be taken with us to Russia.
"He might be left at home. He's sensible enough now to manage the servants and the house and the dogs and everything for us, instead of needing to be looked after himself," his father said.
"Yes, in some moods," I agreed. "He is, of course, the best disciplined and most responsible boy at his school. He seems to be even better disciplined and more responsible than the all-Scotch boys, which is saying a good deal. But he has times when he needs holding in. After that day last week, for instance, you can't say that he is entirely trustworthy."
This mention of the "day last week" had to do with an unforgettable incident. The day had been a lovely one of blue sky and blue sea and high shining sun, and yet all through the long and glorious hours Little Yeogh Wough had sat in the house copying page after page out of a history book. For, thirteen years old though he was, he yet had so far forgotten himself as, in a fit of anger, to shake pepper out of a large pepper-pot over his sister's head and face at the very great risk of blinding her.
I had been doubtful at first between the respective advantages of a whipping and the writing out of these pages of history; but I decided at last on history because he was backward in this particular subject, and also because the sitting still for hours would be the greater punishment to him.
"You know, Roland, this would not have happened if I had been at home," I said to him. "Why did it happen because I was out?"
"They aggravate me," he said simply.
I knew how it had been. Old Nurse, devoted though she was, was of no use whatever for a child with a temperament, and had not perceived the psychic moment when it was necessary to send him out of the nursery. I should have felt it in my blood if I had been there, and the whole ugly affair would not have happened.
"You see the justness of your punishment, don't you, Roland?"
"You're always just, Big Yeogh Wough. I've never known you unjust yet."
So he had set himself to his pages of history, all through the long and lovely summer day.
He said once, later on, that I had never broken a promise to him, either. I had always been careful never to make one which I was not humanly sure of being able to keep. For promises broken to children are greater crimes than many that are punished at the Old Bailey.
So we had not been sure in any case about leaving Little Yeogh Wough at home; and when he pleaded to go with us on board the Peninsular and Oriental liner that was to take us and certain others on her maiden trip in the Baltic, we gave way far more easily than he might have expected.
"Would you have been very miserable if we had said No to you, Roland?" I asked him.
"No. I should have been sorry, but I should have remembered that text that you're always saying."
"Text?" I lifted my eyes in surprise.
"Yes. You know, that one: 'Blessed are they that expect nothing, for they shall not be disappointed.'"
"That's not a text. It ought to be, but it isn't. But it's a very good motto to steer through life by. The thing to do is always to expect nothing, but to try for everything."
And so it came about that on a certain Friday morning in August the brave little feet of the boy of my heart walked for the first time on the deck of a big ship.
I am superstitious—nearly as superstitious as Napoleon was. Little Yeogh Wough has always known this well, for all through his life, from two years old, he has been careful never to bring any hawthorn, ivy, or peacock's feathers into the house, and has always made the flower-women selling snowdrops strip the ivy from the bunches he had bought for me. I will not sing before breakfast, and I will not have three candles burning in the room, and I would not, under any pressure, have a new house built for me or even have an old house considerably altered. For this I know is true, whatever else in superstition may be nonsense—that whoever builds a new home for himself and takes a pride in it, shall have something terrible happen to him which will prevent him from enjoying his life in that home, even if he should ever get so far as to live in it. For, even in the days when I had not been stricken to the earth and did not believe in the Bible, I had always believed in the truth of the words:
"Fools build houses and wise men live in them."
One only has to read about the lives of the great millionaires to have proof that this is so.
But I am quite open-minded about Fridays. If anything, I think Friday is a luckier day for me than any other day. I also have a fixed conviction that neither I, nor any of those nearest to me, is born to die by the quite easy and pleasant method of drowning. So we started on a Friday without a qualm.
And I did not dream that, even as he ran about this deck and began to live this new life, he was starting on another stage of his training for a soldier!
"What a lot of portraits of the Kaiser we've seen!" he said to me one day, when his feet had covered most of the cubic space of Amsterdam, Christiania, Copenhagen, and Stockholm.
I laughed. "We really have seen a good many, haven't we? But you don't mind that, do you? I thought you rather liked his personal appearance."
"Well, he did look very fine at the funeral of Queen Victoria. I always remember that. But I don't see why he should be all over the place in these countries that don't belong to him."
In a palace in Stockholm his inevitable picture occupied an especially conspicuous position on the wall of a certain room. At the same time, the arrangement of the furniture of that room struck us as quite surprisingly ugly and unsuitable.
"What a pity to have the piano where it is!" I remarked to our guide. "It would be so much better over at the other side of the room."
"It used to be over at the other side, but the Kaiser came here on a visit a little while ago and had it moved. He's had nearly all the furniture in the room altered."
Little Yeogh Wough opened his brown eyes very wide.
"You wouldn't expect a man like him to take such an interest in little things," he said.
"It's only by taking an interest in little things that you can get big ones to come right," I told him. "Remember what I told you about Kitchener and the rails for the new line in the Soudan."
"Do you think we shall ever really have a war with Germany, Big Yeogh Wough?"
"Yes, dear, very surely. If it comes in my lifetime, I hope it will come before I am old, because there will be dreadful things happen which old people will not be able to face. It might mean almost a going back to savage life—even at home in England."
He looked at me as if he thought I could not mean what I was saying. He knows better now.
On the ship they called him the "Encyclopædia Britannica," and said he might be safely referred to when any information on any subject was required.
"If I'm still in the position I'm in now when that boy gets old enough to think of making a start in the world, I hope you'll let me be of some use to him," said a high Government official who was among the passengers. "You and his father are not thinking of the Army for him, of course. His eyes not being right puts soldiering out of court."
"His eyes will be all right in a few months," I replied. "But we should not think of the Army for him, in any case. By the way, there isn't a single soldier among the people on this ship."
No, there was not a single soldier on board. And yet, since then, I have shed tears for five of the men who were before me as I talked that day, and who have given up their lives for their country. Many others whom I did not know so well have gone over the awful border, too, and the rest are in khaki; all the rest, that is, who had something of youth still in their blood.
"Aren't the Russians splendid?" the boy cried to me a few days later. "They're just right, you see, because they've got the two sorts of men in them both at the same time—the football-playing, hard-hitting sort, and the other sort that loves poetry and likes beautiful things."
"Yes, you are right. That is just what makes Russians so fascinating," I said.
There was cholera in Petrograd—and we had told Little Yeogh Wough that he would only be allowed to go there once or twice and would have to spend most of his time waiting on the ship off Cronstadt, while we went to the capital, and thence on to Moscow.
But we had reckoned without Little Yeogh Wough himself.
Coming back from Moscow to Petrograd, we were thunderstruck to see, just outside the Empress Mother's palace, in the magnificent Nevski Prospect, a fine-built, boyish figure, that stepped out very gaily and held its head very high.
"Surely that can't be Roland!" I exclaimed in amazement.
"It certainly is Roland," declared his father grimly.
Little Yeogh Wough—wandering through Petrograd alone!
He was looking at a carriage drawn by four long-tailed, coal-black, fiery-eyed horses, and at the dazzling uniform of an officer who sat in the carriage. Then he hurried into a side-street and we got out of the droshky we were in and followed him on foot.
How much at home he was! how gaily he walked here alone in this city where the very letters of the alphabet over the shop fronts were strange and mysterious!
A man and woman who looked like Americans were walking in front of him and, just as these two passed the door of the largest house in the street, a man came out and accosted them. He seemed to be making a mistake as to their identity, and a babel of questions and answers began in Russian and English, neither side knowing what the other said. Then Little Yeogh Wough reached the group and stopped and began to talk.
"He must have been spending his time learning Russian!" my husband cried in astonishment. "He is actually putting the matter right."
We had come near enough to catch the boy's words—halting, jerky words, and yet clearly decent Russian, since they were understood. We seized him by the arm.
"What are you doing here alone?" we wanted to know.
"Oh, I'm all right! I've been teaching myself a bit of Russian. I know now what that word means that you noticed over the shop the other day and that you said looked like 'photograph.' It's 'restaurant.'"
"You enterprising little wretch!" I said, laughing.
I went in earlier than he expected one evening in answer to his never-failing appeal: "Come and see me in bed, mother!" and found him sitting up in his berth with a scrap of pencil and a crumpled pocket notebook and his eyes glued on something that he saw through his open porthole.
He had the top inner berth, on the corridor side of the cabin, and by looking across the corridor he could get a complete view of nearly the whole of the dining-room of the liner. He thrust his pencil and paper out of sight under his blankets as I drew near; but he had done this too late, and he knew it as he met my look with one of his delightful smiles.
"Whatever are you doing, Little Yeogh Wough? Show me that notebook."
He drew forth the crumpled little pad of paper, and I found scribbled on it the following entries:
"Mr. B——, four whiskies and sodas, with the whisky more than half-way up the glass each time.
"Mrs. Delaplaine Waterton—three glasses of sherry and bitters.
"Mr. Pinkerby—a Kümmel and three whiskies.
"Lord ——, five whiskies and sodas, making eight since two o'clock this afternoon."
"Oh, Roland! How naughty of you! Whatever put it into your head to spy on people like this?"
The laugh that was on his lips was now dancing in his big brown eyes.
"It doesn't do them any harm, and it's very funny," he said. "I can hear a good deal of what they say. I don't want to listen, you know, but I can't help hearing. Still, it doesn't matter, because I would not tell anybody for anything in the world.... Just fancy, Big Yeogh Wough, we're going to be in Kiel to-morrow! I shall see father in a tobacconist's shop again."
"Is there anything so very wonderful in that?"
"Of course there is. He's a different man directly he gets into a tobacconist's. You really wouldn't know he was father. It's so funny to watch him."
"Oh! Men are always like that, dear. You'll be like it yourself when you're a grown man. No matter how much a man loves a woman he gets free from her somehow inside a tobacco shop. But I hope you want to see Kiel for better reasons than that."
He nodded as he patted my hand.
"I know. It's the Kaiser's jewel of a port, where he hugs up the beginnings of his navy."
"Yes—his navy which he thinks will one day beat ours. I hope we shall be able to see one or two of his ships—yet I don't expect we shall. He believes in the old saying that children and fools—especially British fools—shouldn't see half-done work."
"If you don't mind, Big Yeogh Wough, I'm not going to wear my glasses when we go ashore there to-morrow. I don't really need them to see with, you know, and I don't want to look as if I'd got anything wrong with me when I'm going through a German town."
"All right, you dear boy. And we'll try to get a look at Wilhelm's ships. But what does it matter what they are like? We'll drum them up the North Sea as we drummed others before them. We've nothing to fear from outsiders as long as we don't let any dry rot get into us at home."
"Kitchener and others like him will see to that."
"Kitchener can't see to everything. It would take scores of great men to make a breakwater against a whole flood of dull stupidity. We've all got to help. You'll have to help a lot. You'll have to learn to be very strong—but without being hard. If you are hard you're like a hyacinth in a March gale as compared with a daffodil. The hyacinth stands up stiffly and thinks it's strong, but the wind snaps it in a minute, while the bending daffodil comes out all right. It's always like that with men who try to kill their softer side, and who don't understand women and don't trust them. And now you must go to sleep."
"Will you promise to wake me up when you come to bed and want your dress undone? I'm so much easier to wake than father."
"Yes, I'll wake you. You see, your knowing how to undo my dress will make you a better magistrate one day, or a better governor of an Indian province. There are people who wouldn't see how this is so, but it's true."
Kiel looked quite gay when we opened our eyes upon it next morning. It would have looked gayer still if the ships in the harbour had not been of such a hideous dull grey colour—exactly that of an insect that I have always detested, known as the slater.
The Kaiser's private pleasure yacht, the Hohenzollern, was there and was certainly white; but it was a white that looked as if it ought to have been grey.
I have no doubt that the Hohenzollern was a miracle of luxury inside, with her silver bath for the Kaiser's daughter and other sybaritic appointments; but outside she was not a dream of loveliness. Neither were the two warships that we saw anything like as handsome to behold as our own battleships.
"What funny tin-pot things they look!" said Little Yeogh Wough. "Now I know why all the toy ships we have that are made in Germany never look a bit like ours. They don't look so professional, somehow. Perhaps it's because we're not used to them. I hope they'll let us go on board them."
"Perhaps they will, as there are five or six members of Parliament among us and the head of the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard," I said quite confidently.
But it was notified to us early by the Kiel authorities that the two warships were, as one might say, in déshabille, and not tidy enough and trim enough to be inspected. So we had to content ourselves with walking about the town.
Little Yeogh Wough took a snapshot of the Hohenzollern from the jetty, and then walked along with pride and satisfaction on his handsome face because he had managed to do this without attracting anybody's notice. Then we turned up the long main street and saw a good many pretty villas that were charming enough to make one feel one could live in them quite comfortably for two or three months of the summer.
"It is a very nice place," I said, as we passed the last of these tree-embowered villas and began to walk up the hilly main street where the shops begin. "Here's your tobacco shop, by the way."
I stayed outside on the pavement while Little Yeogh Wough went in with his father. When they came out a German officer came out also, treated me to a long, close look and swung on his way.
"He stared hard at me in the shop and then said: 'You're English, are you?'" the boy of my heart informed me. "I told him I was, and he looked hard at me all over again. I felt quite glad that I'd come out without my glasses on."
I felt glad, too, as I looked at his bright face.
How queerly white his lucky lock showed in the sunshine! Surely nothing very bad could ever happen to him in life when he had a lock like that!
"I'm sorry to have to say it, but this old watchmaker fellow here has put my watch right twice as well as an ordinary watchmaker in this sort of town at home in England would do it, and has done it in half the time, into the bargain," his father said presently, emerging from another little shop. "It's astonishing how capable these Germans are. It's a pity they aren't a little better at sanitation. What awful smells there are all over this town!"
This was true. We had been worried by stenches ever since we had begun to walk up the hilly street.
On the way back two small incidents occurred. The first was that Little Yeogh Wough nearly got into serious trouble by taking a photograph of half a dozen street urchins, and the second was that we passed a battalion of soldiers marching with such regularity that the whole mass of them was like one huge moving machine. We stopped and watched them go by, never dreaming of what was coming to us and to them in the very near future.
Ah, Heaven! If we could have foreseen the thing that was coming!
That afternoon the brightness of the day had gone and heavy showers of rain made me give up the idea of going ashore again. Little Yeogh Wough went, however, with his father, and when they came back two hours later he gave me one of the most perfect dark red roses that I have ever seen in my life.
"A German girl gave it to me," he told me. "I asked her for it, right straight out. We were sheltering from one of the showers under the wall of one of those villa gardens, and I saw the rose and it looked so lovely that I told father that I wished I could get it for you. Then, just as the rain was leaving off, the girl came out of the villa into the garden and I asked father to tell me what words to say in German to ask for the rose. And he told me, and I asked her. I couldn't have done it for myself. I only did it because I wanted the rose for you so badly. And she actually said: 'Ja' and gave it to me. Then she smiled and said: 'Auf wiedersehen.' I asked father what that meant, and he said it was the same as the French au revoir, or 'To our next meeting.' But I don't suppose I shall ever see that German girl again."
"No. I don't suppose you ever will."
And so he got his first German gift.
That night I wore the rose.
We had to wait about in the Kiel Canal because a ship had got stuck across one of the narrow parts of it. And the boy said:
"The Kaiser must have felt very much shut in before this canal was made. How funny it is to be on board a ship on a strip of water that's sometimes so narrow that you could have a talk with the people on the banks on either side—just as if you were on the Regent's Canal at home in London!"
It was a joyous occasion for Little Yeogh Wough when he lay in his bed again for his good-night talk with me, and not in a berth.
"It's nice to come home and be welcomed by the children and the dogs. What a pity it is that dogs can't welcome us when we go to Heaven! I've been thinking this ever since Miss Torry told me that Tita didn't eat anything for four days after we'd gone and was so cross with her puppies that she gave them smacks with her paw every time they came near her—all because her heart was breaking. And just because she's got four legs and fur instead of two legs and a bare skin she isn't supposed to have a soul."
His eyes were looking full into mine as our faces rested against the pillow, close to each other.
I had returned to the house an hour in front of him and I knew in what a wonderful way the place seemed to get richer directly he appeared inside its walls. Everything took on a new value the moment he got near it. It is a fine thing not to be an impoverisher, but it is a finer thing still to be an enricher. It is a particularly valuable quality to young people starting in life on small incomes. He himself knew it when he saw it in others.
"I say, Big Yeogh Wough, how is it that you always look quite expensively dressed in hats and coats that most people would throw away if they saw them off you?" he asked me one day.
"I don't know, dear. I only know that there are people like that, while there are other people who could walk through the East End on a Bank Holiday in a fifty-guinea musical-comedy hat without having a single person look at them twice. It hasn't anything to do with handsomeness. Some really beautiful people aren't worth looking at. It has to do with style. When you grow up you'll never need to envy a field-marshal his uniform. Just by being yourself you'll have a uniform more dazzling than any that was ever worn in Europe."
"Is that why you never envy women who can buy their clothes in Paris?"
"I'm too conceited to envy them," I answered him. "A woman who envies other women their things can't think very much of herself. Now, I think so much of myself that if I choose to go out with a hole in my stocking, then holes in stockings are the fashion. You must feel like that, too—within limits. Only, of course, a well-bred man always needs to be smarter than a well-bred woman. By the way, I met one of the great French man-dressmakers at a luncheon at the Mansion House one day and he taught me a lot of wisdom. It all came to this—that you can't dress the undressable person and that the dressable person doesn't need dressing. He said that the struggle to dress royal women and millionaires' wives who were not dressable had turned his hair prematurely grey."
"I suppose it comes to this, too—that we must cultivate ourselves and trust to luck for the rest?"
"Of course," I nodded. "Whatever happens to you—I mean, whatever things you may have to do without—take care that you keep yourself in good condition, body and mind. You can always get new clothes when you want them, so long as the figure they're going to be hung on is all right. Keep your bloom and your graces and your style. Why, even if people went about naked, like savages, there would still be some among them well dressed and some not!"
To-night, as I knelt by his bed with my head resting on the pillow beside his, his mind was on graver things.
"I've been thinking a lot about souls and that sort of thing since Miss Torry told me just now that the colonel along the road here is supposed to be dying. I saw the vicar go in there. I don't want that kind of man coming about me when I'm dying. I couldn't tell my feelings then to a man I'd been playing tennis with a month or two before. Asking a man like that to help you in your last minutes would seem more like a joke than anything else."
"You strange boy! Why, the vicar is a very good man."
"I know he is; but that doesn't make any difference. I'd rather have a worse man who kept to his own calling more."
This was the first time for a long while that the boy of my heart had spoken to me about religion. It prepared me for what I came upon accidentally next day in a private drawer which he had happened to leave not only unlocked, but yawning open—an ivory crucifix.
I stood and looked at the sacred thing, as it lay partly hidden and partly revealed among a few boyish treasures that included a few letters that I had written him at the rare times when we had been separated.
That crucifix hidden away in his drawer meant more, far more, than even I could guess. It told a story of strange workings in the deeps of his soul. I knew better than to say a word to him about it. But that night, when I went to see him in bed, my kiss was warmer and my arm under his head tenderer even than usual.
"Dear Big Yeogh Wough! Dear Big Yeogh Wough!" he murmured caressingly.
"How is it, Roland, that you never say 'darling'? I don't think I've ever heard you say it in your life, any more than I've ever heard you talk slang."
"I don't know. I don't want to say it, somehow. You know, you yourself say it's cheap."
"It's cheap when a woman says it, because women generally say it too easily; but it can be a grand word when a man speaks it—or a boy. Still, I am quite satisfied that you should call me just Big Yeogh Wough. I know I am dearer to you than anyone else in the world can ever be—at least, until you grow up and fall in love."
I had spoken with a laugh, but he answered me gravely.
"I shall have to find a very special sort of girl before I leave you for her."
A few minutes later, when I had risen from beside his bed and was opening his window, he said:
"Did you see those Territorials coming along just as we turned in at the gate here? Did you see how well they marched? Of course, they were only Territorials and people always laugh at them, but there's something so splendid in the sound of marching feet that I can't get it out of my head. It made me feel for the first time almost sorry that I'm never going to be a soldier."
Oh, that splendid sound of marching feet, so grand, so gay, and yet so heartbreaking! He was to hear it often enough in a very few years to come!
There was one thing which more than any other had power to rouse whatever demon of Temper lurked far down under the sweetness of Little Yeogh Wough's nature; and that was Croquet.
It is no wonder that a well-known judge said a year or two ago in his court that from personal experience he knew croquet to be more trying to the temper than anything else in the world. And the objectionable game was at the root of a good deal of trouble that arose at this time between the Boy and me.
He never could bear to be beaten at anything. This feeling has been his driving power in all his life. Even Old Nurse knew of it, for one day when I had said to her that he never told a lie, she answered me:
"No. That's true; he don't tell no lies. But that isn't from loving the truth. It's only because 'e won't be beaten at it. 'E's that full of pride and vanity, he don't know what to do with himself. All these children is full of pride and vanity. When they goes out, if you please, they don't want to go where other people goes, so when we're in the country we 'ides behind a bush so as we can't see nobody and nobody can't see us, and when we're up 'ere in London we goes down back streets where there's nobody else goes but dustmen and cats. And it's all Master Roland's teaching of 'em. He've been making Miss Clare think she's an artist now, and you ought to see our Macademy up on the nursery walls. She've been in a temper all this day because I won't sit with nothing on for 'er to make a picture of Venus rising from the sea."
Meanwhile, Little Yeogh Wough played croquet desperately on the lawn between the banks of marguerites.
(Dear marguerites! I remember how, whenever he was near them, they all took on a Frenchy gaiety and distinction that lent a new charm to their English prettiness and purity.)
He was not allowed to play with his little sister and brother, because he thought too much of himself and too little of them. He was then told off to play with any friends of the family who happened to be on a visit at the house, and the end of this usually was that when in the evening he came to say good night and made his unfailing appeal: "Come and see me in bed, mother," I answered him severely: "No, Roland. You behaved too badly at croquet to-day."
He stood and looked at me wistfully. He always did this when I rebuked him. He never asked questions in words, but only with his big brown eyes.
"I happened to be upstairs at the open nursery window and I saw you and heard you," I went on. "You were most rude to Mr. ——. If you ever play croquet with him again you will have the goodness to remember that he is a married man of fifty-five and not another boy of fourteen, like yourself, and you will treat him with respect."
"But he got my ball at the beginning of the game and put it through all the hoops and I couldn't get it back!"
"Don't make excuses. Leave those to weak characters. An excuse is always worse than the thing it tries to cover up. You lost your temper and forgot your manners, and you will not play croquet again for a fortnight."
This meant a fortnight of proud, dignified unhappiness. And it was while this fit of quiet bitterness was still on him that he did a dreadful thing.
One day, when I came home after having been out two or three hours, I found an ominous grimness in the atmosphere of the house, and everybody I met seemed to have a longer upper lip than usual.
"What's the matter?" I asked Miss Torry, who had a horror-stricken look.
"It's Roland. He has been up in the nursery and knocked his sister down and trampled on her. It's a wonder that he hasn't broken any of her ribs."
And I had been out buying pretty clothes in order the better to live up to this boy's ideal of me!
I found him sitting in the dining-room, waiting for his tea, which he always had with us.
"Roland, is it true that you have been upstairs and knocked your sister down and trampled upon her?"
"Yes, mother, it's quite true." His eyes met mine unflinchingly.
"And you have done this unmanly thing ... you, my boy, that I worship so much!"
"Yes." He answered me very low, but very steadily. "She made me angry because she hadn't got any imagination. I asked her to imagine the nursery door was red and she said she couldn't because it was white. That made me so angry that I couldn't help knocking her down."
"You little coward!" I said to him very quietly. "You little coward!"
I saw his eyes flinch then and fill with tears and his face grow first very red and then deadly white, while his mouth began to quiver and twitch.
And I went out in search of a cane.
That was the last whipping he ever had; and the last occasion on which he could ever be accused of acting unchivalrously towards any feminine person.
"Little Yeogh Wough, why do you do these things and lower my grand ideas of you?" I asked him when I went to see him in bed the next night. "And, apart from that, why do you put it into the power of Old Nurse and other people to say that I am a fool for worshipping you as I do? You are not kind to me when you do that. You see, I know in spite of everything that you are good and great; but they don't know because they are blind, and so they think me wrong and believe you to be a brutal little coward. Why do you give them the chance?"
"It's Clare. She aggravates me. She precipitates."
"Precipitates?" I looked at him wonderingly.
"Yes. She always rushes headlong at the wrong thing. Yesterday afternoon I was beginning to tell Nurse that there was something wrong with my eiderdown, and I'd just got out the first syllable ei when Clare broke in: 'Oh, yes, Roland, I knew there was something wrong with your eye. I saw it directly you came in.' That was what began to get my temper up. Then I said something sharp to her and she answered me back. She said that when she grew up she'd take a cottage on Dartmoor to receive me in when I came out of the convict prison. What do you think of that for a girl of eleven?"
"Rather bright. And in any case she is a girl and you are bound to honour girls and women all the days of your life. A sister should be a very holy and lovely thing to a brother, Little Yeogh Wough, as you will know some day."
Now that he has grown big and is a soldier, he has in very deed come to know this, as is shown by something he said in a letter which he sent to his sister from the Front only a few days ago:
"My dear Bystander,
"I wonder what makes you a Bystander?
"I don't know; but I do know that I haven't got the stuff in me of which Bystanders are made. I must be the Principal Player or nothing. I know, too, that a Bystander knows more and understands more than a Principal Player. I often think that if anyone wanted a concise description of myself I should do better to send them to you than to anyone else. It is no longer a case of 'dear little sister and baby brother,' as it used to be once when I said my prayers; but for a boy the milestones are whiter and more evident than for a girl. The Public School and Osborne and Oxford are landmarks which you have nothing equivalent to set against.
"And yet this big brother ... autocratic, meteoric, inconsiderate ... who writes to you often as if you were the Stores, sees more and knows more and thinks more than even Bystanders give him credit for. The three years between us were once a very great deal of difference, but that time has passed. Let it rather be, as I once wrote on a photograph for you, Frater sorori; amicus amico. Someone remarked to me the other day: 'All your family are such dears ... all of them.'
"Yes."
Looking back again, I remember that it was in the time of the coming out of the almond blossom that Little Yeogh Wough tried for a scholarship at Winchester and failed, as he had known beforehand that he would fail, because never once in his life had he succeeded in getting anything at the first time of trying for it. And it was not very long afterwards that he came out triumphantly in an even harder examination and so won his way into another great Public School.
He signalised his triumph by asking that evening with quite unusual boldness and assurance: "Father, can I have the first hot water in the bath?"
And his father, who usually defended that first hot water as a tigress defends her cubs, answered him with almost boisterous goodwill:
"Certainly, my boy, certainly. Tell the cook to pile on the coal and make it hotter than ever." And this was the dear, delightful man who, if he saw a light in the bathroom window when he was coming home in the evening, would take to running along the street like a creature possessed, and if asked what was the matter, would reply distractedly as he ran:
"Somebody's in the bathroom! Somebody's having a bath ... taking all the hot water! I must get home and stop it. I must get home and stop it."
There was another evening on which the boy of my heart was allowed to take the first bloom off the hot-water supply in the bathroom, instead of having to indulge his love of a hot bath at some other and more inconvenient time of the day; and this was the evening before he set out for the first time for the Public School on the Tableland.
He was a very shy and nervous boy when he went, though he was to be prince-like in his pride when he came back.
"That there Master Roland 'ull have a bilious attack when he gets to that there School," Old Nurse declared, as she watched him go. "'E always feels it in the inside when his nerves is upset. It was just the same when 'e was learning to ride. He would keep on with that there dangerous 'orse, just because he wouldn't be beaten, and it was a wonder to me as he didn't get yellow jaundice. If he don't end up with a bilious attack to-day, he'll be lucky."
There was a curious weight of gloom upon the house after his cab had driven away. The little sister moped in a corner and the still smaller brother sobbed silently behind the door of a room in which he was not expected to be.
I knew that destiny was working, but I did not know how resolutely or how pitilessly. I did not know it even when, at the beginning of the second term, we were asked to give our permission for the boy to join the Officers' Training Corps.
"Of course he must join it," we agreed. "It will do him all the good in the world, both in body and in character. He's not likely ever to have to practise what he will learn there; but every male child born in the British Empire ought to know how to be a soldier in case of need."
So he took the first step; the step which has led after only a few years to my being here where I am to-night—waiting for him to come home on his second leave from the Front, where he has been fighting in the great war that darkens the whole world.
His first holidays were such amazing days of joy! They were the winter holidays, too, and that made them better. The house in London had been in full swing, seeming to brim over with children and dogs and high spirits; and, within due limits of discipline, Little Yeogh Wough had been master of it all.
He had had a fairly hard time during the term, though we did not know it until long afterwards. A secret society of slackers had tried to baulk his energy and blunt his ability by threatening him with ghastly penalties if he got to the top of his form. Five of them had met him one day on his way from his house to his class-room and had thrown him over a gate into a field. He had got up and dealt with them one after another, and after that the threatening letters with death heads and cross-bones drawn in blood had ceased to come and he had had peace.
The bodily strength of him had developed enormously in the three months, and yet, directly he had come home, the tender, irresistibly fascinating side of him had sprung to the fore again. The gracious boyish dignity and charm of him filled the whole atmosphere on those afternoons when wind and rain and sleet made the London that he loved a bad place to be out in, and in the comfortable study he made his small toy gramophone give out a sweeter music than I have ever heard from the large and expensive instrument that now holds the place of honour in the home.
"But I wonder why everything sounds so sad," Miss Torry asked suddenly one day. "It's always the same, whatever record he puts on. There's always a sound of heartbreak in it, even if it's a comic song."
"That's like his character and his eyes," I laughed. "All gaiety and joy in living, but with throbs of heartbreak underneath."
Then there were happier hours still when I was going out to dinner and he would superintend my dressing and be particular about the flowers I was going to wear, or throw himself across the foot of the bed and read me French books or old French plays while I brushed my hair.
"It's so lovely to get back to London and to you, Big Yeogh Wough. When I've done with school and Oxford, you'll let me live near you always, won't you?"
"You won't be able to live near me if you go in for the Indian Civil Service," I reminded him. "And that's more suited to you than anything else, you know."
"Then I shall try to be literary and not have anything to do with the Indian Civil Service," he declared, half angrily. "Oh, by the way, as soon as I get back to school I'm going to get rooms for you and father for our Speech Day. They've got to be secured early, or you mayn't get any. Sometimes people take them a year in advance."
That first Speech Day, when it did arrive, was a marvellous occasion. He had urged me in half a dozen letters to make great efforts in the direction of clothes, and most of all in the matter of a hat, and as soon as I arrived he anxiously inspected my outfit.
"Yes, that's all right," he pronounced, tenderly touching the new lilac frock which I had lifted out of my trunk, and looking admiringly at the plumed black hat that was to be worn with it. "You'll look splendid and I shall be very proud of you."
"But you ought to be just as proud of me if I were a frump," I said.
"You couldn't be a frump and be my mother," he returned. And to this day I don't know whether this remark was more of a compliment to himself or to me.
Just as dance music is sadder than any Dead March ever composed, so youth and gaiety make one think of death more than ever old age does.
Really, most of the old people that one knows, and particularly the old men, make one think of anything rather than the grave. They are skittish, frivolous, doing their best to dance upon their crutches and holding on to the good things of this world with a desperate grip which youth never has.
That is why youth goes out to fight so readily.
But a great Public School, with its army of eager-faced boys and its echoing stones and its clamour of gay voices, not only makes me think of death, but makes even the past ages of the world pass in procession before my terrified eyes. I can see Death walking in the boyish ranks always, mocking at their pink youth with the grisly horror of his grey decay.
I don't know whether I have a special kind of vision for this horror. I only know that I see it where other people don't seem to see it. In the same way I always find Paris the saddest city in the world, because it is the brightest. I love Paris, but I am never able to breathe in it. When I get back to London the choking feeling goes; for in London, under superficial gloom, there is peace for the nerves and solid happiness.
The choking feeling was in my throat all through that Speech Day. It gripped me first early in the morning when I went to the beautiful chapel and saw recorded on the walls the names of the sons of the School who had given their lives for their country. There were many of them even then. (Ah, Heaven! I dread to think how many there are now!) And I could have kissed the wall where they are recorded in my passion of gratitude and admiration and reverence.
If it comes to that, I should like to drag myself on my hands and knees over the stones of such a place as this in that very passion of reverence. Is it any wonder that these boys died so bravely when they came from a place where chivalry, knightliness, graciousness and the truest manliness have come down as a heritage through hundreds of years?
It is strange how the stalking shape of Death seemed to be clanking his dry bones everywhere for me that day! It seemed to grin at me when I smiled in pride at seeing Little Yeogh Wough in the khaki of the Officers' Training Corps. It grinned, too, at the other women, who were there in hundreds—mothers, sisters, aunts, or cousins of the boys—all looking like butterflies in frocks of the "confection" kind and hats from Paris or from the Maison Lewis.
What a mockery clothes are when the great things of life come along!
"Roland, are you satisfied with my dress and hat?" I asked him in a whisper, when I got a chance.
"Of course I am. They look better than anybody else's here."
"But they wouldn't look half so nice laid out on a bed as most of these other people's things would."
"No. I don't suppose they would. That's just why they look so much better on."
"You clever boy! Then you've found out already that there are two different kinds of love of dress—the false kind, which thinks it's all right when it buys pretty things and hangs them on itself, and the true kind, which carefully chooses every shade of colour and every bit of material to be a frame and set-off for the wearer's particular sort of good looks. You've got the insight to see that what looks like a bit of brown holland when laid on a bed or hung on a peg may make a woman lovely enough to turn men's heads, while a confection that has cost a hundred guineas may leave everybody cold. You've only got to look around here to see that it is not the clothes that matter, but the human flesh and blood inside them. Why, one of our greatest society beauties once went through a London season with only two frocks to her name—one for day, one for evening, and both black. And yet she outshone everybody else."
We were going into the concert hall and there the figure of Death seemed to me more hideously clear than anywhere else. But I said nothing to Little Yeogh Wough of this curious oppression that was upon me. He was shyly proud of having had many prizes, and I went on talking lightly, very low, as we waited for the concert to begin.
"I think you'll know enough about women to be able to judge them well for yourself when you grow up. Look at that girl in the front row of seats with all sorts of bits of chiffon and odd ribbons about her. She has changed her position five times since we came in, trying to put herself so that everybody coming up the middle of the hall shall take notice of her. And do you see how she keeps on touching her bits of ribbon and chiffon—pulling them out or patting them down? Well, that's the kind of girl you must avoid when you're grown up. She's a prinker, and a prinker is horrible. You see, you can be quite sure even before looking at her face that she isn't very pretty, because a very pretty woman doesn't need to prink in order to try to attract notice. She attracts it too much. She would rather escape it if she could. So, when you grow up, Little Yeogh Wough, you must find a girl whose lovely head and full throat rise best from out a plain linen collar. You must avoid prinkers, just as a woman looking for a husband ought to avoid a doxer."
"Whatever is a doxer?"
"A doxer's generally a man—a man who smiles too agreeably and moves his head and body about in a funny way directly he gets among strangers. But never mind the doxers or the prinkers, either. I want to listen to this piece by Sibelius."
The strange fear of the future clutched at my throat more and more. It got to be almost more than I could bear when a little later the most spirited of the school songs swelled into the air, sung by scores of voices: