THE EXTRAVAGANT BABY
These pictures rush back across my mind with intense vividness as I sit
waiting.
It is between a fortnight and three weeks since I first had the hope
that he might come home on this second leave.
The way the sudden hope affected me showed me how little I had expected
that he would ever come home again. I had lived through the fearfulness
and anguish of his death so many times in the early days when he had
just gone out to the Front. One day in particular I remember when, in
the quiet of the big house by the sea, with the drip, drip of the rain
telling us that it was useless to hope to go out, we had gone to lie
down for half an hour after lunch and to read an article in a newspaper
on the hospital at Bailleul.
We were three of us resting on the wide bed--I and the boy's father and
his sixteen-year-old sister, whom he always called The Bystander, who
was lying across the foot of the bed. The newspaper article was by an
American journalist, describing with mingled power and tenderness some
dreadful cases that had been taken to the hospital. Then there was
mention made of a boy soldier who did not seem very badly hurt and whom
the doctor ordered to be placed on one side for conveyance to England.
The American journalist looked at the boy a few moments later and then
touched the medical officer's sleeve.
"Doctor," he said in a low voice, "that boy will never go to England.
He's going to sleep in France."
Going to sleep in France!
The awful, unspeakable piteousness of the simple little sentence cut
through me like a knife. It seemed to me that all my heart and all my
soul melted away in tears as I lay there and sobbed and sobbed.
The boy's father and sister were crying, too.
And then I prayed.
I had always been a self-centred, worldly woman, not much inclined to
prayer; but in that hour I prayed with the humble passionateness of
dread and desperation.
How I loved the boy--I, who had never believed that I could really
unselfishly love anybody!
It had always been a wonderful thing that I should love him as I did--I
who had never felt my heart yearn towards children. But he had been to
me in a sense a child of atonement. When he was born I had said to
myself that I would atone by devotion for many sins of selfishness which
I need not particularise here.
But, then, it was easy enough to worship him in any case. For even in
his earliest babyhood he had the peculiar gift of Style. He helped one
to live, just as a beautiful flower does, or a great poem or picture.
There are so many people in this world who are Impoverishers! They don't
know it. Most of them wouldn't even know what you meant if you told them
they belonged to the great all-round cheapening class. Yet there they
are, always making everything about them look worse than it is. Some of
them are so far gone in want of style that if they went to Buckingham
Palace they would immediately make it look like a shoddy place in Acton
or Wandsworth. On the other hand, there are a few rare and blessed souls
who would make a pigsty look a proper abode for royalty.
It has nothing to do with money. It has nothing to do with clothes. It
has only to do with Self.
My Little Yeogh Wough is one of these.
From the first week of his life he made everybody about him live up to
their income. He mutely demanded the best of everything, even while his
mere presence lent a charm and glory to the worst of things. I had had
ideas of a four-and-sixpenny woollen hat and a ten-and-sixpenny pelisse
as quite good enough for any baby; but when I looked at him I saw that
it had to be a thirty-five shilling hat and a four-guinea cloak.
Somehow or other, he made his nurse quite a distinguished person to look
at, while he himself soon became a delight to the eye, with his big,
brown velvety eyes, his exquisite skin, his mass of shining curls and
his portly little body--so portly that it looked as if it were
artificially inflated and a puncture by a pin might cause a collapse.
"I can't understand how it is," a friend said to me once. "As a rule,
babies, like cats, make a place look common, but he never does. He's got
a sort of kinghood about him."
This was true of him then as it is true of him to-day. And I was
reverent. But there were times when I was afraid. For I am a believer in
Compensation, and I know that where your special pride and joy are,
there shall you only too surely be stricken.
If you are proud of your bodily beauty, then in that beauty shall you be
degraded. Not for you then shall be the disease that comes in the leg or
the toe or in some wholly unobtrusive place where no one need know of
it. To you it will come either in the eye, so that you have to wear an
eyeshade, or in the form of a skin disorder, so that the fairness and
perfectness of your complexion may be lost to you. I have read of one of
our most successful business men that his great passion in life being
the taking of country rambles with a botanical interest, he had told
himself that when he had made enough money to be fairly comfortable in
life he would give up working and devote himself to walking as a hobby;
but just as his business began to be successful he became paralysed in
the lower limbs, and thenceforward could only go about in a bathchair.
This is only one instance out of the scores that present themselves to
us on every hand. Compensation is a very real and very pitiless Force.
Knowing this, I was afraid; terribly afraid: and as I saw the beauty
grow in Little Yeogh Wough's baby body and in his mind, which always,
even from the beginning, seemed to know things which he had never been
taught, I began to pray night after night:
"Don't take him away from me, oh God! Don't take him away!"
And now he is in khaki, a lieutenant and adjutant at just twenty years
old--and is coming home from the Front on his second leave.
When I first realised that he would soon be coming home, I went out into
the loft over the old stables and took his baby clothes out of an old
trunk and looked at them. And, as I looked, it seemed to me such a
little while since he had worn them.
How patient I had been with him in those days--I, who am not patient by
nature! How I had walked up and down with him, sat up at night with
him, sung for him strange songs about butcher boys and tom cats, and
interrupted my work a score of times every hour for him! But I never
yielded to him, not even in those babyhood days, for I wanted him to
grow up to be a fine sample of manhood, and I knew that if he was to do
that he must know that his mother was not weak.
A little cream silk coat and a pair of cream woollen gaiters reminded me
of his first tryings to speak. His little stumbling words had always had
a thought behind them. How he had taken us aback one morning when he had
presented himself before us with a pen behind his ear, saying with an
owl-like wiseness: "Fishman doos that." This referred to the fishmonger
whom he visited every morning with his old nurse for the giving of
orders. And then, another time, when I was annoyed with my brother and
said to him that something he had done was: "Just the sort of thing that
eccentric males always do," the room door had opened suddenly to admit a
little figure in the cream silk pelisse and woollen gaiters, and a baby
voice had cried reproachfully:
"Not 'centric males. No!"
"He's beginning pretty early to stand up for his own sex," my brother
said with a laugh that drove away the cloud of annoyance between us.
And yet the boy had in him that touch of the feminine which the best
men have and which makes them irresistible. Already in his little way he
had a knightly reverence for womanhood. Already his few pence of pocket
money were spent on flowers for me.
I remember that what struck me most when he came into the room at this
time was his brave little walk. He always had such brave, gay feet! I
thought of this again last week when in answer to my question in a
letter as to how his battalion had got all the way down from near Ypres
to somewhere east of Abbeville, he said:
"We got a train for a bit of the way, but mostly we came on our feet."
Oh, the dear, dear feet, so plucky and untiring! And how I loved the
"we" and the "our"! He always has identified himself with his men, so
that they know that he cares for them, and they would follow him, as his
colonel put it, "anywhere and into anything."
And that day in his small childhood the little feet had a charm that for
an instant brought quick hot tears into my eyes.
He was very shy, though sometimes he could be very bold--as when one
day, coming into the dining-room and finding a certain important person
sitting there, he fetched on his own account a box of Vafiadis and,
thrusting them under the visitor's eyes, said coolly:
"'Ave a cigawette?"
At other times nothing could induce him to go into a room where there
was someone who was a stranger to him.
His first experience of serious punishment came of this sensitiveness
and shyness. A very well-known but decidedly ugly man was in the
drawing-room, and the child, under pressure, went in to be seen of him.
But when he caught sight of the visitor, his feelings overcame him.
"Shunny man! Ugly man!" he cried; and he turned and bolted.
And so sweet was that ugly man that he not only forgave him, but
declared afterwards that it was the wretched little insulter's charm and
beauty which had led him to think of marriage in the hope of having
children of his own. But, as for me--I left the visitor to my husband's
care, and, following the three-year-old sinner out of the room and
upstairs to the nursery, whither he had fled, I administered personal
chastisement.
I soon found, however, that to punish him for social misbehaviour would
not always be possible, because most of his naughtiness in this respect
was due to nerves. It seemed to be a penalty attaching to his really
unusual beauty that I should be unable to show it off. Many and many a
time I took him to literary and artistic gatherings only to find myself
obliged to send him home with his nurse before any exhibiting of him had
been possible. The least excitement would throw him into such a fit of
nerves as made even his grandmothers learn new wisdom about childhood.
He was never gleeful. He had the sweetest, gladdest smile in the world,
but there was always an underlying sadness in him that worried the many
good people who imagine that if a child is happy it must needs be
jumping about and laughing more or less noisily. And a great grief came
to him at this time when his first nurse left to be married.
Fond though he was of me, he was yet so unhappy over this that he was
very nearly ill. How different children's characters are! His sister,
The Bystander, then three months old, never cared who nursed her. Nurses
might come and nurses might go, but as long as she was fed and bathed
and looked after, she cared not a tinker's curse.
And then there came two very important new-comers to the household--a
black puppy, and the elderly woman who from then till now has been known
as the Old Nurse.
Oh, that Old Nurse! what would she say now if she were watching and
waiting here with us for her Master Roland to come home on leave,
instead of lying in her grave as she has been for eighteen months, where
the alarms of war reach her not!