THE FIRST STEPS OF THE LITTLE FEET
There is nothing like smells, or clothes, for bringing back the past.
The scent of the American currant will always bring my childhood back to
me when even music could not do it. The hardest-hearted criminal can be
softened sometimes to yielding and to tears by some smell that brings
back an old home life long since forgotten. In the same way the sight of
clothes worn in other days sends the memory darting back across the
years. So it was with me when I was rummaging among my Little Yeogh
Wough's things and found a pink linen coat and knee breeches and a
little white-frilled shirt that had been worn with them.
That little pink linen suit lit up the past for me just as a lamp lights
up a dark place into which it is suddenly carried.
I had a vision of yellow curls under a sailor hat and sunning out over a
white embroidery collar. I saw little brown hands always finding
something to do and doing it masterfully, reckless of consequences. I
saw happy Christmases and birthdays made stupendously joyous by the
coming of luxurious toys, which may have been wastefully extravagant,
but which helped, anyhow, to build a foundation of happiness for the
child and his sister and brother to look back to in after years. I saw
battles in the nursery in which the Old Nurse and the under nurse were
sometimes worsted and even received personal injuries. But, above all, I
saw two scenes which had a bearing on the future of my Yeogh Wough, who
was one day to go to the trenches in France and Flanders and fight for
his country.
The first was the occasion of the christening of his newly arrived small
brother. The scene was a London church, and after the christening
ceremony the clergyman looked at Yeogh Wough and then spoke to me.
"This elder boy was only baptised privately, at home, I believe?"
"Yes."
"Then he ought to be received properly into the Church. I will do it
now."
And he put out his hand and drew Yeogh Wough towards him.
The boy went deathly white and we who watched him knew that one of his
attacks of nerves was threatening. The big, brown, velvety eyes were for
a moment shrinking and wavering. Then, as if something said within him
that when one is a boy of just six years old one must go forward with
things and play the game, he steadied and straightened himself
suddenly, lifted his big head very high--it was like the head of a lion
cub--and, though his cheeks were bloodless still, went through the
ceremony without faltering.
"He's got the stuff in him that heroes are made of," someone said to his
father and to me. "He'd go to martyrdom just in the same way."
The other scene that stands out took place half a year earlier, when he
was five and a half. He had been down on a visit to some relatives in
the country and was talking about a particular pond which he had seen.
Then his father began to tell him the story of how the famous American
preacher Theodore Parker, when he was a little boy, was standing one day
by a pond, looking at a beautiful flower that grew at its edge, when a
frog suddenly came up out of the water. Young Parker took up a stone to
kill the frog, but stopped because a voice within him, which was the
voice of his conscience, told him that it would be wrong to take the
harmless creature's life.
"Yes, fa'ver," Little Yeogh Wough nodded wisely. "I know about that
voice. I've heard it, too. I'm hearing it now."
"You're hearing it now, Roland? What do you mean?"
"Why, down at Uncle Jack's there were some nice round things, all white
and red and smooth, and I wanted them and I asked Auntie May if I could
have them and she said: 'No, Yoland, you can't have them, because
they're ivowy card counters.' And I didn't like her telling me I
couldn't have them, so I took them when she was gone out, and I've
bwought them up here to London wiv' me. Nurse doesn't know. I've got
them now. But I don't feel as if I want them now."
"No, of course not. That was very wrong of you. You must go and get them
at once and give them up to your mother or to me and we will send them
back to Auntie May and tell her that you are very sorry."
"Yes, I've been sorry ever since I bwought them up."
A little blue silk suit flashed my thoughts back to a garden party which
the weather turned into an indoor party, and at which Little Yeogh Wough
made himself a small Master of the Ceremonies, taking away from his
smaller sister an ice which she had secretly captured and conducting her
upstairs on the pretext that at three and a half years old she was too
young to take part in social affairs. How the gay, brave little feet
went about that day, with the joy of the May-time in the house, in spite
of the rain, and outside all the glamour and the glory of a London that
as yet knew not the Great War!
There is an American song in which a mother declares that she never
raised her son to be a soldier. I never raised my son to be a soldier.
I thought he had too much brain power for the Army, especially if there
was to be no war. And yet I was making him a soldier every day, and,
above all, every night.
For every night of his life, from the time he was two years old, I had
gone to see him in bed, as he phrased it. Now and again there was a
break in these nightly visits, when I had to go out to dinner, and
especially to an unusually early dinner; but, except for these rare
breaks, I never failed the child in these good-night talks.
"Come and see me in bed, mother," was his regular appeal after his
good-night kiss. And I went, and after hearing him say his prayers I
knelt down by his bedside and talked to him, sometimes for a whole hour.
Not that he and I had long talks at these particular times only. All day
long, until his school days came, we were together. I never talked down
to him or tried to make myself a child for him. It was he who was always
trying to reach up to me. When I brushed my hair or looked over my
clothes or dressed for some affair or other, he was in my room always
and I talked to him in French, until he came to know in a tender easy
way that tongue which has been of so much use to him in this past year
of the War, when, as adjutant, and as Mess President of his battalion,
he has needed to do a good deal of talking with people who haven't a
word of English. He would hear me repeating snatches of poetry, too, and
afterwards, when he was alone, he could be heard saying them over to
himself in a way which showed that he perfectly grasped their meaning.
He walked with me, drove with me, watched me at my work, and, as soon as
he was able to read, began to read to me. For I had hurt my eyes by
overwork then and could not read to myself. It was my Compensation for
having him and for having at the same time a little--a very
little--worldly success.
This belief in Compensation has become a part of my life now and stops
my natural gaiety. I have never had a happy day yet or a whole-hearted
laugh without paying for it. This is what makes me afraid now that Yeogh
Wough is coming home on his second leave. A man who is fighting for his
country does not come home unwounded on his second leave without
something happening.
Oh, if people would only see this and take care! But they are blind to
instances of it that are about them every day. Lord Roberts bought his
Boer War successes with the death of his son. Lieutenant Warneford paid
for his double V.C. with his life when he next went up into the air. And
so on.
At night, when I knelt by Yeogh Wough's bedside till my knees were sore,
the things we talked of were different. We put Henley and Browning and
Stevenson and others of their kind aside then and I spoke to him of what
boyhood means and what manhood means; of the glories of manly work,
such as engineering, shipbuilding, inventing, and the need for hard
striving and straight living.
"You must never be feeble, Little Yeogh Wough. Feebleness is a thing
that nobody can forgive, except in old people and children. It's better
to be strong in doing bad things than not strong at all. But you'll get
to know when you grow up that badness is only a funny kind of weakness.
You must be strong. Look at Kitchener! He's got on by being strong and
thorough. They say that when the rails came for the building of the
Soudan railway he examined every yard of metal himself, not trusting to
other people. That's thoroughness."
I taught him what patriotism means.
He had lived through the Boer War, though it had found him hardly more
than four years old. He had seen a woman burst into tears in the street
when a regiment of Highlanders swung past, and I had told him why she
had done so and all about Magersfontein. I had told him the story of the
American Civil War, lighting it up with such things as the story of the
play "Secret Service." I had put great figures up as models for him, and
among them was the figure of Cecil Rhodes. I had taught him that the
least little thing he did, even so small a thing as the mending of a
toy, must be done thoroughly, because he was British born and had the
British repute to keep up. And then together, he with his curly head on
the pillow and his hand clasping mine as I knelt beside the bed, we
would repeat poems by Newbolt and Conan Doyle and Quiller Couch. The one
he came to love best was Newbolt's "Vitæ Lampada" with those lines:--
"The sand of the desert is sodden red,
Red with the wreck of a square that broke;
The Gatling's jammed and the Colonel's dead,
And the regiment's blind with dust and smoke;
The river of death has brimmed its banks,
And England's far and honour's a name;
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
'Play up! Play up! And play the game'!"
"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."
"This is the word that, year by year,
While in her place the School is set,
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dares forget;
This they all, with a joyful mind,
Bear through life like a torch in flame;
And, falling, fling to the hosts behind:
'Play up! Play up! And play the game!'"
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.