THE BOY'S TREASURES AND OTHER THINGS
I went to look at his room, feeling that it ought to be done up before
he comes home.
It would certainly be improved by new wallpaper, but I dare not have
this improvement made. Superstition reminds me that I have often noticed
how unlucky people have been who have had their bedrooms done up. They
are always either ill in the rooms or else never occupy them any more. I
decided at once that I would not have it done. The room was attractive
enough, as it is, with its high, narrow, mirror-hung door leading into
the bathroom, and its vast wardrobe packed full now with his ordinary
clothes, his military great-coat--too long and cumbersome for the
trenches, even in winter--and piles of small books which in the past two
years he has bought out of his own pocket-money; and his sword.
The bed had an air as if it were waiting for him. The darling boy! How
thankfully he nestled down between the sheets when he came home the
first time! His big brown eyes were almost wild, that night. He had the
look of a man who has been back for a time into savage life and wonders
at the most everyday things of civilisation.
"I haven't slept in a proper bed since I first went out," he said.
"Why, what about that French château where you said everything was so
luxurious?" I asked him.
"Oh, everything is comparative!" He laughed. "I had a feather bed on the
floor there and it seemed to be almost a wicked luxury even though there
were no sheets or pillows and I had only my brown blanket over me."
Yes, even then, a fortnight ago, his bed had an air of expectancy about
it, as if it knew that he had written to say he was coming again. Above
the head of it the wall was bare, because I had left it to him to decide
what should be put there, and he never cared two straws what his room
looked like as long as it had all the little things he wanted in it and
was within a dozen yards of a bathroom.
That unlucky bathroom! Why is it that bathrooms and staircases cause
more angry passions in a household than anything else?
I, for example, am not a bad-tempered woman. I am positive that even my
worst enemy--my worst feminine enemy--would think twice before laying
ill-temper to my charge; yet when anybody meets me on the stairs, or
comes upstairs close behind me, I feel inhuman. I quite understand the
mood of the late editor of one of the great daily newspapers, who drove
from his house without notice any servant unlucky enough to meet him on
the stairs. So, too, when a new London club was started a few years ago
in a very tall and narrow house, I said it could never succeed, because
all the people--members and servants alike--were always mounting and
descending the staircases, like Burne Jones's figures on the Golden
Stairs. And it did not succeed.
In the same way, most men cannot bear that the door of any room, even
the most private, in their own home should be locked against them. And
this brings me back to the bathroom and Little Yeogh Wough.
When a bathroom is of the ordinary kind, the only cause of trouble, as a
rule, is whether the hot water is hot enough. But this particular
bathroom has three doors, and the occupants of the three contiguous
rooms from which those doors give access occasionally emerged at the
same time and fiercely disputed possession of the means of cleanliness.
When Little Yeogh Wough was at home he usually slipped in at a
well-chosen moment by his particular door and, locking the two other
doors on the inside, remained master of the situation, while various
other members of the family, and notably his father, stormed outside.
The boy had always been a fanatical devotee of the Bath, and since he
has been in the trenches and personal cleanliness has been difficult, he
has become more so than ever. He loves his room because of this door
leading into the bathroom, and more so still because of the long mirror
set in the door on his own side.
For he is vain, my Little Yeogh Wough. There is nothing effeminate about
him, though he knows a great deal of womanly lore and could, for
instance, choose the right lace for a particular gown as well as I could
do it myself. There is nothing of the tailor's or hairdresser's dummy
about him, with clothes looking like those pictured in an illustrated
booklet and hair plastered with the meticulous exactitude required of
men going into a Thames racing craft, where one hair more on one side or
the other might sink the cranky shell and plunge them into the river. He
is smart and polished and speckless as any prince with a valet at five
hundred a year, and he brilliantined his rather fair and very rebellious
locks until in the process of subduing they became many shades darker
than their natural hue; yet he always saw clearly and maintained firmly
that clothes should set off the man or woman and not be allowed to make
use of the glorious human figure as a mere peg on which to display
themselves, while hair should never advertise the coiffeur. So, though
he has always examined himself before looking-glasses and had pots of
all sorts of toilet things on his dressing-table, yet he has always
been the manliest of the manly.
"Why shouldn't a boy look in the glass as well as a girl?" he said to me
one day. "I don't see why it should only be the females that are allowed
to take pleasure in whatever good things in the way of looks may happen
to have been given them."
All his little personal ways came back to me as I moved about his room,
making sure that nothing should be missing when he came. The back brush
he had bought for the bath looked a little dusty, so I washed it. Even
as I did this, snatches of poems which I would rather not have
remembered just then kept on coming to my mind and my lips. There was a
poem called "Aftermath" in _The Times_, which I shall never be able to
forget. It begins:
"Yes ... he is gone ... there is the message ... see!
My son ... my eldest son. So be it, God!
This is no time for tears ... no time to mourn.
In the years to come,
When we have done our work, and God's own peace
With tranquil glory floods a troubled world,
Why, then, perhaps, in the old hall at home,
Our eyes, my wife, shall meet and gleam, and mark,
Niched on the walls in sanctity of pride,
Hal's sword, Dick's medal, and the cross He won,
Yet never wore. That is the time for tears;
Drawn from a well of love deep down ... deep down;
Deep as the mystery of immortal souls.
That is the time for tears ... not now! Not now!"
And then the last line of some verses which I saw somewhere else,
headed "The Second Lieutenant":
"Up and up to his God,"
and, best and worst of all, Rupert Brooke's:
"If I should die, think only this of me,
That there's one corner of a foreign field
Shall be for ever England----"
When I got to this point, the tears which had been blinding me so that I
could hardly see what I was doing brimmed over and fell on the back
brush. Why did I let those tears come when I ought to have been smiling
and singing because he is coming home?
I might as well be foolish enough to cry now, when I am sitting here
waiting for him and when I know that at some blessed moment during the
next half-hour he is bound to come in.
I was quite angry with myself when I wiped my tears away that time a
fortnight ago. I dried the back brush with unnecessary energy and then
took another and closer look about his room.
One of his hats and his riding whip hung together on the wall above
shelves of books which he had bought himself. Every one of those books
spoke to me of him as I glanced at their titles. Another bookcase was
gloriously rich with his Public School prizes. Such handsome, wonderful
books they are; and there are about fifty of them. What a tale they
tell of power and effort! I had had a curtain made for the bookcase, to
keep the dust away from these most precious of treasures, and as I drew
the velvet folds back now and looked at the massive ornamental volumes,
I felt a thrill at the thought that my continual spurring of him onward
and upward had not been in vain.
"And he has never disappointed me," I thought aloud.
No, he had never disappointed me. And people as a rule are so
disappointing! One's friends fall short, one's lover says the wrong
thing at the wrong time, or forgets to say the right thing--which is
even worse--and one's dearest clergymen and favourite actors and heroes
generally make unspeakable fools of themselves just as one is getting
ready to fall on one's knees and worship them.
All my life I have asked too much of people and then been left gaping at
their unsatisfyingness. So it was no wonder that I was always frankly
amazed whenever I stopped to realise that Little Yeogh Wough had always
come up to my expectations.
Not that he was ever a prig. Heaven forbid! I would run farther from a
prig than from a criminal. He has always had heaps of faults. But they
are fine faults. One never rams one's head against a blank wall in him,
but always finds deeps and deeps behind.
"That there Master Roland 'ave got so many nooks and corners in his
mind that you can't never tell when you've got to the end of 'im," Old
Nurse said once, mixing up her words, but showing her meaning plainly
enough. "And what I says is, 'e'll go on getting deeper and deeper all
his life, till 'e gets into the sincere and yellow leaf, as the
Scriptures calls it."
Oh, how his room went on speaking to me of him! Sargent's picture of
Carmencita, the Spanish dancer, is over the fireplace, with two fencing
foils crossed above it; and above these again is a picture of two
stately lovers walking by the shore in Brittany. The table near the foot
of the bed had a pile of little military books upon it--"Quick Training
for War" and its fellows--and dear little books of poems, and some
sheets of his favourite green blotting-paper. He put himself out a good
deal to get that green blotting-paper, saying that white showed the ink
stains too much, while pink was an abomination, like a red flannel
petticoat for a woman or a magenta pelisse for a pallid, blue-eyed
child.
The dressing-table drawers were, and still are, full of things that he
has no use for at the Front; all except the two small drawers on either
side of the looking-glass, which have got a few old letters in them and
a few odds and ends of nice things, such as solidified Eau de Cologne
and the most deliciously fragrant shaving cream.
Shaving, indeed! Why, he has only done it for a year or so! I am sorry,
by the way, that he has got a moustache now. Speaking for myself, I
don't like a man with a moustache, except in the capacity of lover. Of
course, I hate beards, anyhow. They always make me think of Abraham and
Isaac and all those old uninteresting men whom no woman with any romance
in her would look at twice, even if it were a case of him and of her
being the sole survivors of the human race in the world. By the way,
though, I did once see a beard which was attractive--or, more
truthfully, was not unattractive. It was a short, silky, auburn beard,
torpedo-shaped, and it was on a naval officer who was otherwise so
charming that he might perhaps have carried off worse things than this
with success. But, coming back to the moustache, it is a fit appendage
for a man in the lover stage, because it gives an impression of
masculinity. But when a man is my uncle or my father, or simply my
friend, and above all, when he is likely to argue much with me, I prefer
him to be clean shaven. It gives me a feeling of equality.
When I was a little girl I used to wonder why a man's words, however
silly, always seemed to have more importance than a woman's words,
however wise; and I satisfied myself that it was because a man's
statements nearly always came from under a moustache. Even if he only
said how fine the day was, the fact that the remark came from a mouth
that had a black or brown or golden porch to it gave it a quite undue
amount of weight. On the other hand, when I talk with men whose faces
are as hairless as my own, I don't feel that they have any advantage
over me. So, as I often have long discussions with Little Yeogh Wough, I
felt quite sorry when he had to get a moustache.
Still, he is my Little Yeogh Wough, whose babyish and boyish weaknesses
I have known and loved so well.
As I looked more and more round the room, I got more reminders of his
small-boyish and babyish times. Under the bed, with several pairs of
handsome boots, there was the wreck of an old, squeaky gramophone, and
the yet more interesting wreck of a toy typewriter, with which, at the
age of eleven, he printed twelve numbers of a monthly home magazine
called "The Vallombrosa Record," all by himself. A dusty golliwog and a
Teddy bear are jammed in among the ruins of these things, together with
a few feathers from the tail of an old life-size cock which used to
stand on the night nursery mantelpiece.
I opened the wardrobe. The first thing that my hand touched was a
tape-measure, in the shape of a negro's head, with the tape coming out
of the mouth. And how this thing brought back to me the Little Yeogh
Wough of six and a half years old!
One fine spring morning, my secretary, Miss Torry, had scurried into my
study in our London house with this thing in her hand and her face
severe.
"Really, you ought to begin training this boy's moral character," said
she, speaking with the freedom of one who, though employed by me, was
yet older than I. "You see this tape measure. He bought it for a
Christmas present for his grand-mamma because he wanted it himself, and
he felt quite sure she would give it back to him as soon as she knew he
wanted it; but she didn't, and now he's been up there to Hampstead and
wheedled it out of her. He's very selfish, you know, and it ought to be
nipped in the bud. And he's extravagant with his selfishness--and so
cunning, too! Look at the way he came to you yesterday and asked you for
a shilling--at his age!--and went out and bought a miserable little
peach for tenpence and brought it to you with a great deal of fuss and
hung round while you ate it, so that he got you to give him quite
nine-tenths of it, and then told you all the evening that he'd made you
a present of a peach. Now this is a tendency that ought to be checked.
Canon Bloomfield of St. Margaret's says that----"
"It's all right, Miss Torry. The boy is not really cunning, though he
seems so. He has a dear little heart, and, in spite of his tricks, he
would give his brown velvet eyes right out of his head for me."
I put down the old negro head tape-measure and took up a dark little
overcoat dating from the time when he was seven. I had brought it in
here out of an old box, meaning to give it away. It was badly cut, and
so he had never worn it much; because, even at seven years old, he had
known when a coat had no style, and had hated it. Certainly it used to
make him--yes, even him--look almost commonplace.
"Fancy the little wretch having known at seven years old whether a thing
made him look commonplace or not!" I thought with a laugh as I moved the
unsatisfactory garment aside.
He had known at that early age, too, whether my own clothes were
satisfactory or not. He had always taken a vivid, throbbing interest in
every new garment I had; yes, and in every new yard of ribbon and in
every spray of flowers.
"Perhaps it's a good thing he has met Vera and taken a fancy to her,
even though he is only a boy still," I said to myself aloud. "Such a
fellow as he is might so easily get into trouble with the wrong
woman--especially now that he's in khaki. There's so much dash about
him. I should fall in love with him myself in five minutes, if I were
not his mother."
Falling in love? How absurd it seems in connection with this boy whom I
had given to the world, and whose very early boyhood was only such a
little way back!
My cook has only been here eight years, and yet she remembers him as
quite a small boy. It makes me laugh to think of her amazement when I
mention that he has a great friendship for Vera.
"Friendship for a young lady, mum? What? Master Roland? Well, I never
did! What the boys is coming to in this war, I don't know. And there's
the newspapers all advising 'em to get married before they go out.
Mischievous nonsense, I call it. What's the good of getting married to a
man who may leave you a widow inside of a month? Two or three girls I
know have just done that, for the sake of getting the men's money.
Downright mean, I call it, and hard on the taxpayers that have got to
keep the soldiers' widows and orphans; and so I told 'em. Of course,
it's different for your sort; but it's not right for the likes of us.
It's not my idea of gettin' married, anyhow, and so I told my young man
when he was going out."
"But wouldn't you feel more sure of him, Joanna, if he'd married you?
You see, if he were your husband, and not only just your lover, you'd
know that you could trust him out there, and that he wouldn't be
flirting with French girls."
But Joanna laughed doubtfully.
"I don't see as that follows, mum. 'Usbands flirts just as much as
lovers, from what I've seen. And I'm not afraid of my young man
flirting, anyhow, because he isn't the sort. You see, he never calls me
darling in his letters, or anything like that. If he was to do that
kind of thing, then I should know that he was very likely carrying on
with other girls. But he only puts in a 'dear' now and then, and that's
the sort that you can trust."
Wise philosopher of the kitchen! If only all women would judge their men
as truthfully.
"But to think of Master Roland!" the cook began again.
Yes, to think of Little Yeogh Wough beginning to care for any girl!
As I went on rummaging in the wardrobe, I came across a little loose
pile of letters which he had sent back from the Front. I should never
dream in the ordinary way of reading anybody else's letters--I carefully
avoid looking into his private drawer in this same piece of
furniture--but it happens that he told me playfully that I could read
any of the letters in this particular little pile, if I chose.
The first two were from myself to him. Of course I might look at those.
They bore signs of violent usage in the opening. I have a habit of
fastening down the flaps of my envelopes with stickphast, and then
making them still more secure by sitting on the letters in a book. So
Little Yeogh Wough had often told me that, whenever he saw a letter of
mine arriving, he sent his soldier servant for an entrenching tool to
open it with.
Not that he had any right to tease me on this matter. For he followed
the same plan himself in fastening letters. He always used stickphast
and he always sat on the missives in a book.
Whenever we bought a book that we did not enjoy, we took it to sit on as
a correspondence flattener.
"Don't you ever believe anybody who says they've opened by mistake any
letter that you'd written," Little Yeogh Wough said to me once. "It's a
sheer impossibility."
The letter from myself to him, which I had just taken up, was one which
he had marked to be put away later on in his despatch box for permanent
safe keeping. I recognise it as one that I had written at a time when I
knew he was in particular danger. Vera had made him promise that when
there was going to be a great "push," or when any other circumstances
arose which materially increased the ordinary risk to his life, he would
send her a certain short Latin sentence. In an hour of crisis he had
sent this sentence, and the anxious girl, who thought of him all day and
dreamed of him all night, had passed on the warning to me.
A chill ran through my blood as I re-read my own written words:
"_Monday, 27th Sept., 1915._
"MY OWN SWEET LITTLE YEOGH WOUGH,--
"The news from the French front this morning filled us with joy.
For a moment I positively danced. All those thousands of German
prisoners meant so much! And then a horrible thought came to me
that it must mean worse danger for you; and now a letter from Vera
says that you have sent her a few words--of which Big Yeogh Wough
is perhaps a little jealous--to say that the posts will be stopped
very soon.
"This strikes me as very significant. It would have given me a
danger signal, even apart from that 'short Latin sentence' which I
hear you have also sent.
"Dearest, your Big Yeogh Wough, who has always been so proud of you
ever since you have been born, is prouder of you than ever now. She
is glad you are where your duty of honour and manhood demand that
you should be. You are fighting, not only for us and all that we
glory in, but for those who have died--and who are all your
brothers, whether they were peers or privates. I feel at this
moment that I should like to go the round of the whole army and
kiss them every one--but keeping always a special kiss for you.
"But this pride and this gladness don't prevent me from being on
the rack. I have been troubled for some days past; and I should
have written to you several times during this interval in which I
have been silent, if it were not that I have been much more than
usually occupied with the delicate steering of things in general.
But always my heart and my thoughts are with you, my very precious
boy. I only wish my love could be of use as a talisman, to guard
you against all the dangers.
"Your always devoted, in all lives through which we may pass,
"BIG YEOGH WOUGH.
"Your cake will be sent off to you to-day. The Bystander has just
written to you."
Ah, thank God! He came safely through that time of extra-acute peril. If
he had not come through it--what sort of human wreck should I be now?
I shivered as I put the letter down with fingers that were not quite
steady.
Then I took up another letter from the pile--a letter with a London
postmark and with a Hammersmith address for its heading.
"What a common-looking, sloppy handwriting!" I thought as I looked at
it.
And the thing began:
"You dear pigeon of a Roly."
And it was signed:
"Your duck of a Queenie."
And underneath the "Queenie" there were actually crosses for kisses, as
if the letter were from a tweenymaid!
I got a shock. Shivers went down my back. What vulgar creature could
this be who had dared to make so free with the purest-minded and least
vulgar boy in all the world? Who was she that had taken advantage of him
like this, just because he was at large and in khaki?