BOY OF MY HEART
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
MCMXVI
TO
"LITTLE YEOGH WOUGH"
A FOREWORD
The Publishers wish to state that this is a book of absolute fact--not a
work of fiction. From cover to cover it is the truth, and the truth
only--a record exact and faithful, both in large things and in small, of
the short years of a boy who willingly and even joyously gave up his
life and all its brilliant promise for the sake of his country.
Even the tragic coincidence of the news of his death reaching his home
in the very hour in which he himself was expected there on leave, is
what actually occurred.
CONTENTS
PART I
CHAPTER I
PAGE
WAITING 15
CHAPTER II
THE EXTRAVAGANT BABY 26
CHAPTER III
THE FIRST STEPS OF THE LITTLE FEET 35
CHAPTER IV
THE BOY'S TREASURES AND OTHER THINGS 46
CHAPTER V
GOOD DAYS AND GOOD-NIGHTS 64
CHAPTER VI
PASSING SHADOWS 82
CHAPTER VII
A MOTTO TO STEER BY 100
PART II
THE TWO GERMAN GIFTS
CHAPTER VIII
THE FIRST GERMAN GIFT--A ROSE 111
CHAPTER IX
THE WAY OF A BROTHER 124
CHAPTER X
THE FEEDING OF LOVE 132
CHAPTER XI
THE ANGER OF LOVE 148
CHAPTER XII
IN THE DANGER ZONE 157
CHAPTER XIII
THE SECOND GERMAN GIFT 194
PATRIOTISM
"It is not a song in the street, and a wreath on a column, and a flag
flying from a window and a pro-Boer under a pump. It is a thing very
holy and very terrible, like life itself. It is a burden to be borne; a
thing to labour for and to suffer for and to die for; a thing which
gives no happiness and no pleasantness ... but a hard life, an unknown
grave, and the respect and bared heads of those who follow."--JOHN
MASEFIELD.
(Quotation found written in a notebook in the pocket of "Little
Yeogh Wough" when he received his death wound, Dec. 23rd, 1915.)
PART I
CHAPTER I
WAITING
It is half-past nine o'clock at night and I, an eager-hearted woman, sit
waiting still for dinner, with a letter open before me from my son in
the fighting line. It is addressed to me in his pet name for me:--
FRANCE, 10.12.15.
DEAREST BIG YEOGH WOUGH,--
I feel very distressed about a sentence in a letter of Vera's that
arrived a few minutes ago. I have been away from my battalion for
nearly ten days now, and in consequence all my correspondence is
waiting for me there and cannot be sent on because they don't know
where I am precisely, and couldn't very well send over here if they
did. The letter that came this evening was addressed: "Attached 1st
---- Light Infantry," and must have been sent on the chance of
reaching me. In it Vera says that you seem changed since she saw
you last--rather anxious, and worn, and very tired. I am quite at
sea as to when and how she saw you, but gather from the context
that she must have been down to Sunny Cliff. Is this so? But I do
hope that you are not "rather anxious and worn and very tired." It
troubles me muchly. Qu'est ce qu'il y a? Is it finances and family
navigation; or working too hard; or myself; or what? Please do tell
me. Is there anything I can do?
I seem to be very much cut off from everything and everybody just
lately. Sometimes I rather exult in it; sometimes I wonder how much
of the old Roland is left. I have learnt much; I have gained much;
I have grown up suddenly; I have got to know the ways of the world.
But there is a poem of Verlaine's that I remember sometimes:
"O, qu'as tu fait, toi que voilà,
Pleurant sans cesse?
Dis, qu'as tu fait, toi que voilà,
De ta jeunesse?"
As I told you last week, I hope to be coming over again to see you
soon--quite soon, in fact. Those words of Vera's, though, have
troubled me much.
Meanwhile,
Very much love to Father and The Bystander,
Always your devoted,
L. Y. W.
P.S. (a day later).--Have got leave from the 24th to the 31st.
Shall land on the 25th.
Such a very wistful letter! It is the saddest, I think, that I have ever
had from him. But, oh! what the postscript means to me!
Land on the 25th!
Our home--this house in which I am waiting--is very near the coast. It
is not exactly at the spot where he must land, but it ought not to take
him more than an hour or an hour and a half to get here. And yet it is
half-past nine at night on the 25th, and I and the dinner are still
waiting!
There are others waiting, too. They sat in this room with me at first,
but they got restless and now they are in different parts of the house,
trying to do other things while they wait.
It is so useless trying to do other things when one waits for a really
important thing to happen!
I am restless, too, but somehow my spirit's restlessness takes the form
of a deadly bodily stillness. All of me is waiting under a spell of
suspense, and I feel that if I make the slightest movement I may break
the spell.
It is my darling boy that I am waiting for.
There are girls who may think that it is not romantic waiting for a son;
not so romantic, anyhow, as waiting for a lover. But I know they are
wrong. They have ideas, no doubt, of a grey-haired woman with a mob cap
on and a figure stout to shapelessness, so that she has to sit in an
attitude of extremest inelegance, with skirts of appalling ampleness and
shapeless feet on a hassock; but all mothers are not like this, though a
great many very good, dear ones are. This is the sort that knows best
how the boy's flannels are wearing and what state his socks are in. But
there is another sort that knows a little less about his flannels,
perhaps, and a little less about his socks, but a good deal more about
his mind and soul; and of these latter are the mothers to whom the
grown-up boys whom once they knew as little babies are not sons only,
but friends, comrades, and, in a certain sense, adoring lovers.
Twenty years old! How amazing to think that the boy I am waiting for is
twenty! Of course, every woman with a twenty-year-old son says it
doesn't seem more than a year or two since he was born. But it really is
true, and is not said from any affectation. It only seems a very little
while since my Little Yeogh Wough--as he calls himself--came into the
world. I remember, soon after he was born, going to see a woman friend
with a seven-year-old boy, and actually letting her see in my silly
pride of juvenility that I thought her so old because her boy was seven;
and now my boy, that I am waiting for here to-night, is twenty--and yet
I do not feel myself old.
How the years glide by!
But, after all, though twenty years seems such a very long time, yet it
is not much if you divide it into four spaces of five years. Five years
are nothing. They go in a flash. Well, one only has to have four of
those flashes and there are twenty years gone--and a baby has grown up
to be a man.
And such a man, too--in the case of this boy that I and a spoiling meal
are waiting for!
I don't suppose any two women in the world would agree exactly as to
what good points of body and mind go to make up the ideal man; and then,
too, there are thousands of sensible people who believe that a mother
can never see her children in a true light and with a clear eye. But
where I am concerned their belief is wrong. I am not a born worshipper
of my own kin, and if one of my children had a hare-lip, I think it
would seem to me rather a worse hare-lip than anybody else's. So, when I
say that the boy I am expecting is handsome and attractive, I am telling
the truth. He has that best of all gifts--personality.
Personality is a wonderful thing. It is worth so much more than mere
beauty. Every woman that lives knows how, once or twice in her life, at
least--perhaps quite casually in the street--she has seen a man of whom
she has instantly felt that the woman who belongs to him is very lucky.
The man may not have been very handsome, and he may have been
impecunious looking and badly dressed, but there was something about him
which marked him out as a Man, with a capital M, as distinct from the
mere empty shells of masculinity that walk about among us and have no
power to thrill. I have always called this peculiar and rare quality in
a man the "dignity of the watch chain."
People have laughed at me and have not understood; and so perhaps I had
better try to explain.
It has nothing to do with watch chains. In fact, a man with anything
much in the way of a watch chain cannot very easily have it. Of course,
it never goes with vulgarity. I only mention watch chain at all in
connection with it because there is always a certain dignity about the
chest of the man who has got it. Athletics will not give it, and yet
there is something about the set of the shoulders and the build of the
breast of a man with personality that makes a woman feel that his arms
would shelter her better than any other arms in the world, and that to
be the chosen love of such a Man would be the greatest honour and
delight that life could give.
My Yeogh Wough has got this charm. I can't describe it exactly, but I
know at half a mile's distance when a man has got it. I know directly I
go into a church if any man of the congregation has it. And he, my boy,
had it from the time when he was a few months old--as was testified to
by the fact that a millionaire's wife who hated children asked that he
might be allowed to be downstairs when she was calling on me, because,
she said:
"He's beautiful. He's not like an ordinary child. There's something
about him that draws me."
That seems only to have happened about a year ago, too. And now that
millionaire's wife is a peeress and my Yeogh Wough is just twenty, is a
lieutenant and an adjutant, and is coming home to-day on six days'
leave!
To-day? The day is already gone. It must be a quarter to ten by now and
I dare not think of what the dinner must be like, or the cook's temper.
If she hadn't known him and worshipped him ever since he was little, she
would be in an unmanageable rage. I am beginning almost to be a little
anxious, because this is his second leave and I am a believer in
Compensation. In this world one never gets a good thing twice and the
bolts of fate always fall from the bluest skies.
But I will shut these gleams of fear away from me. The room door will be
pushed open presently and he will come in with his gay, firm step and
his charming smile.
His smile has always had something surprising about it, because his eyes
are so sad.
My Yeogh Wough!
It suddenly occurs to me that Yeogh Wough is a very odd name and must
strike outsiders as very ugly. It has even something Chinese about it.
His real name is Roland, and when he was very little and the pronouncing
of an "r" was beyond him, he called himself Yoland and then Yo-Yo, and
so it came to Yeogh Wough.
It certainly does look very ugly and Chinese. I am sorry for that,
because he not only made it my name for him, but his name for me, too. I
am Big Yeogh Wough, and he is Little Yeogh Wough. It is laughable that
he should be the little one, because he is much bigger than I am now,
having grown to close upon six feet in height; but he still signs his
letters "Little Yeogh Wough," and he says he always will, as long as we
are both alive.
The initials L.Y.W. are at the foot of this message that I am looking at
now, saying that he is coming home.
I am getting very hungry, but I will not begin dinner without him. He is
bound to come within the next half-hour. I have worked out the trains
with the utmost completeness dozens of times to-day. So has his father.
So has his sister.
I will get his photograph down from the top of the cabinet and look at
it. It will help me to get through the last few minutes--or perhaps half
an hour--of waiting.
As I take down the photograph I knock off accidentally from the cabinet
top a tiny newspaper cutting which I had put there in order that I might
not forget it. It is only a cutting from a review of a book, which I
have saved because of two lines quoted in it:--
"He needs not any hearse to bear him hence
Who goes to join the men of Agincourt."
I believe the lines are by a nephew of Mr. Asquith's. Anyhow, whoever
wrote them, they have haunted me ever since I saw them two days ago.
To join the men of Agincourt! What a glorious thing! When I was a
little girl and learned first about Agincourt I used to thrill. Now it
is the same. I felt suddenly an intense longing to go out myself and do
something hard and fierce and dangerous. Oh, yes, I know so well that
the man who dies in a trench or in a charge and who lies unburied or
gets hurriedly laid away under two feet of casual earth, is grander and
more princely than the king who dies in a stately bed in his palace and
is carried to his tomb between packed throngs, standing with bared
heads! In very deed he needs no hearse who goes to join the men of
Agincourt. But let it not be my Yeogh Wough! Not yet! Not yet!
But what am I thinking of? I am not afraid for him. He will be coming
into this room in a moment, looking into my eyes with his wonderful
brown velvet eyes that have always been so amazingly sad, considering
the gaiety of his laugh, and of all his ways.
No, death will not come to him--not in this war. I was afraid at
first--I buried my face in my pillow and sobbed when at eight o'clock
one morning the telegram came from Folkestone announcing that he was
just going to cross the Channel--but now I have got confidence in fate.
He was once taken by one of our friends to an astrologer who told him
that he would probably become a soldier, and that if he did he would die
a violent death by bullet or bomb, but not before he was fifty-eight.
So he cannot die now, at only just twenty. He will get wounded; it is
certainly time he got wounded, for he has been in the trenches nine
months now and people are beginning to look surprised when I tell them
he has not got a scratch yet. They will soon begin to think he hides all
day in his dugout. Yes, he is certain to get wounded soon. But he will
not get killed.
Besides--how could there be any idea of death in connection with a
creature of such vitality?
I feel my pulses quickening as I look at the photograph. He has not got
perfectly regular features--that is to say, he does not look at all like
a hairdresser's dummy--but, oh! how handsome he is and how full of
charm!
One can see even in this half-length portrait that he is not vastly
tall. But the fascination that I have called the "dignity of the watch
chain" is there. It is such a rare thing for a mere boy to have this
fascination! But he has it. It is a perfect sorcery in him. Curiously,
it is hardly ever found either with extreme shortness or extreme
tallness, but mostly in people on the tall side of middle height.
What beautiful furry lashes he has! And his hair flung back in the
Magdalen sweep! Perhaps furriness is the one characteristic that strikes
one most as one looks at him.
I had a long roll of skunk once with a gilt tassel at the end of it,
and his small brother, playing with it, said:
"This is Yeogh Wough's tail. This is just the sort of tail he'd have if
he had one at all."
"But what about the gilt tassel?" I had asked.
"Oh, he'd have that, too! If Yeogh Wough had a tail he'd be sure to get
a gilt tassel for the end of it."
That was just like him. He always loves everything that is the best of
its kind and the most effective. This is one of his weaknesses. But with
what an air he wears his simple everyday khaki! I can quite see why they
called him "Monseigneur" at his public school. His photograph draws me.
I stoop my face and kiss it.
My Yeogh Wough! But is he wholly mine? Is there not somebody else who
wants him even though he is still hardly more than a boy?
And now there floats before my eyes the vision of a girl; a small,
delicate-faced creature with amethystine eyes, who is dreaming dreams
that have got him for their centre.
What a forcing power for sex this war has been, and is!
And now suddenly, as I think of the girl, the cinematograph of the mind
flashes a crowd of vivid pictures across the screen of my memory.