PASSING SHADOWS
It was considered to be a part of my steady spoiling of Little Yeogh
Wough that, while he was still only seven years old, I sent for him to
come over to us in Paris, where we were staying for three months at the
Hôtel Meurice.
As a matter of fact, it was in order that he might not be utterly
spoiled that I sent for him. I had very strong doubts as to the
discipline that was being kept up at the London house by the old Nurse,
under the supervision of my sweet-natured, but too gentle and yielding,
aunt.
"I don't suppose we shall know him for the same boy when he gets out
here," I said to Miss Torry, who was with us. "My aunt, you know, is one
of those dear women who always let in thin ends of wedges all round
them, and she will have had time in a fortnight to let in a good many in
his daily life."
My secretary looked grieved.
"Oh, but you must have more confidence in him than that! He's so fine a
character, even though he is only seven years old, that I don't think he
will have changed just because he may have been differently handled.
Besides, he does worship you so much. He wouldn't do anything to vex you
for the world."
"I don't know. I think it was a little dangerous of me yesterday to tell
those French people what a wonderful boy he is. For one thing, it's
always silly to praise one's own children; and secondly, it's a mistake
to praise anything or anybody to people who haven't seen them yet. You
must not even give praise that is solidly true, because, if you do,
something always happens to make it false. You say your child has a skin
as clear as the may-flower, and by the time you show him up he's
developed pimples. It's the law of Compensation again. It acts in little
things just as in big ones. Anyhow, the boy is sure to have sincere eyes
and a sincere walk, and these two things will go a long way. So very few
people have sincere movements! You've only to look around this hotel to
see that."
"I only hope he'll get here safely!" breathed Miss Torry, who was always
on the look out for disasters. "He's coming over with an irresponsible
sort of man, and accidents do happen so easily that in the present day
one can't be too careful. A precious child like that ought to be looked
after by somebody that can be trusted. Mr. P---- can't be trusted. Why,
don't you remember, he took his own two-year-old child for a drive
somewhere on the East Coast last summer and it fell out of the old
victoria without his knowing it, and he'd left it on the roadside quite
a mile behind him before he missed it?"
Yes, this was true. I had forgotten this incident, and her recalling it
to my mind made me anxious. Still, this Mr. P---- had happened to be
coming over to Paris on purpose to see me on some business matter, and
the temptation to let him bring out the boy of my heart had been too
strong to resist.
Besides, the sight of Paris would do much to help forward Little Yeogh
Wough's education.
"How sorry he'll be to find you so ill and unlike yourself!" went on
Miss Torry. (I had a cold so bad that it had practically become
bronchitis, which, for some mysterious reason, usually happens to me in
Paris.) "But how delighted he'll be with your new black and white frock,
and with the hat with violets!"
Yes. Even at that early age he loved my clothes. He loved them so much
that I used sometimes to wonder if all his devotion to myself would go
if I were shabby and lived in sordid surroundings. As it is, I ask
myself now, in these later days, whom I should dress for if he should be
killed in the war.
His father has the kind of devotion that is not exacting about clothes,
and would burn with as steady a flame if its idol were in sacking as if
she wore the most marvellous confections of the French man-dressmakers.
My racking fits of coughing would not let me go to the station to meet
my treasure; but I dressed myself with as much care to be beheld by him
as if he had been a grown man. I wonder how many mothers put themselves
out to cultivate beauty for the satisfaction of sons of not yet eight
years old?
But the beauty cultivation was all on my side this time. For when he
appeared, marshalled by his father and by the friend who had brought him
over, he wore his little bowler and a badly cut, dark overcoat that he
disliked, and his face was so sullen that the sight of him gave me a
shock.
"Nurse said I must wear this coat, and Auntie said so, too," he
complained, as he struggled out of the objectionable garment after duly
removing his still more objectionable headgear. "I've got a cap in my
pocket that I wore coming over in the boat, but they told me I must put
the bowler on again when I got to the station here. And I nearly didn't
get here at all. I nearly fell out of the train."
"Nearly fell out of the train?"
"Lor'!" exclaimed Miss Torry, throwing up her hands. "I knew something
was going to happen. Whatever was it?"
The friend who had brought the boy began to explain, with a miserable
sense of guilt. He had dropped asleep in the train on the way to Paris,
and Little Yeogh Wough, wanting to explore the corridor, had opened a
door which he thought led out into it, but which was really on the
opposite side and only led out on to the railway track and into the void
of the night. He had been in the very act of stepping down out of the
train, which was going at seventy-five miles an hour, when a Frenchman
sitting in the compartment jumped up and sprang forward and clutched at
him--saving him by a second's space only from what must have been
certain death!
Strange! To think as I look back now that, by this act of saving an
English child, that unknown Frenchman saved a soldier who was to help to
defend France against the next great onslaught of the Germans!
"I told you so," said Miss Torry to my husband and me, when our unlucky
friend had retired to get ready for dinner. "I told you that man wasn't
a fit person to have the charge of a child--and such a child as that.
What a mercy that Frenchman had his wits about him! One can't be too
careful whom one trusts children with in the present day."
"And I told you that the boy would be changed," I said to her in a low
voice, so that Little Yeogh Wough, who had run into the next room, might
not hear. "He's not my boy at all. The difference is perfectly amazing."
Miss Torry threw up her hands again.
"That's it, you see. I knew how it would be directly he got under your
aunt's influence. I knew she'd let him have his way in everything. And
Old Nurse, too! I always did feel that it's never any good trusting
anybody who's got a long upper lip. Well, now I'll go and see that he
washes his face and hands properly. He actually hasn't said yet that
he's sorry you've got such a dreadful cold. I'll tell him what I think
of him."
And she whisked into the inner room.
"I believe a good deal of his disagreeableness comes from that
overcoat," I said to my husband. "He feels that he's looking his worst
in it, and he can't be himself when he feels that. It's all Old Nurse's
fault. She said he'd better not have a fawn cloth one, because his
vanity must be checked at any cost."
Ah! The dear boy! How vain he was when he first put on his khaki eleven
years afterwards!
When his bedtime came, on this his first evening in Paris, he did not
get up to say good night when told to do so.
"Roland, I told you to go to bed. Did you hear me? Put your things away
at once."
He lifted his big brown eyes with rebellion showing in them for the
first time in his life.
"Auntie doesn't mind whether I go to bed when she tells me to or not."
"Oh, doesn't she? I see it was time I had you brought over here. You
will put your things away instantly and go to bed."
Clearly he knew the something in my voice which told him that obedience
would be enforced at once and to the uttermost. And he rose and went.
And yet people have always accused me of spoiling him!
"You see, Little Yeogh Wough," I explained to him in one of our
good-night talks more than a week later. "I want you to grow up to be a
real man, and not a sham one. That is why you must obey. Suppose, when
you grow up, you became a soldier--an officer--and you were ordered to
take your men to a certain spot on a battlefield by a certain time, and
you said to yourself in a slouchy way that a minute late in starting or
arriving wouldn't matter. Well, then, do you know what would happen?
Things would go wrong in that battle, and very likely your men would be
shot down by the guns of your own people; because, you see, the order
would have been given to fire just when you were due to have cleared out
of a certain place--and if you haven't cleared out you yourself are to
blame for any mischief that is done. And it's the same in life. There's
a plan in everything, if you look for it, and if we are disobedient and
don't keep time, we put that plan all wrong."
But that first night I did not have a good-night talk with him at all.
He did not ask me to come and see him in bed, though before I left home
he had been heartbroken at the prospect of my nightly talks with him
being interrupted. For a further and shocking proof of his new
naughtiness had come to light.
Miss Torry, searching in the pockets of his inelegant and despised
overcoat, had pulled forth something which drew from her a louder
"Lor'!" than ever I had heard her utter before. She held the something
up and revealed a long thick tress of coppery brown hair.
"Roland!" I exclaimed. "What is that?"
"It's a piece of Clare's hair," he told us, at once and quite frankly.
Even in his worst moods I never knew him tell an untruth. "I cut it off
just before I came away from home, so I hadn't time to put it anywhere
but in my pocket. I did it because she wouldn't let me do cooking on her
toy kitchen range, that works with methylated spirit. I just got my
scissors quickly and cut it. Nobody knew I did it, though I dare say
Nurse has found out by now."
"Oh, Roland!"
My reproachful exclamation was accompanied by a stream of reproaches
from the horrified Miss Torry. I remembered then that all through his
few short years hitherto Little Yeogh Wough had shown a great interest
in cooking. And he had never even seen the kitchen, or any part of the
basement, of his London home yet. He had called the basement
"Griffiths's Dark," when he was two and a half, because Griffiths was
the name of the cook who reigned there at that time; and the name had
stuck. We had all spoken of the basement ever since as "Griffiths's
Dark."
And so his curious leanings towards cooking had led him to such a breach
of good conduct as the cutting off of a goodly portion of his
four-and-a-half-year-old sister's hair because she would not let him use
her toy range with methylated spirit!
In very deed he had fallen from grace during this fortnight of lax
discipline.
"Roland," I said, "I would give you a whipping for this if I had
actually caught you doing it, or had been told of it at once. But, as
things are, I will punish you in another way. I will not come and see
you in bed for a whole week. I am very much hurt indeed. I did not think
you could ever behave so badly."
He said nothing. But his lips quivered and his eyes filled with tears.
He was to sleep in a little room opening out of mine and his father's. I
meant at first not to go in there at all, but on second thoughts I
simply went in and saw that his bedclothes were properly arranged. I did
not say a second good night to him, but came away as if the person in
the bed were a total stranger to me.
"Are you going so soon?" His voice came after me rather piteously.
"Aren't you going to talk to me?"
"Not to-night, Roland. You know that, because I said so. You must go to
sleep now."
"Won't you call me Little Yeogh Wough?" he persisted wistfully.
"No. You're not Little Yeogh Wough to-night. You're not the same boy
that I left when I came away from home. You're only Roland. I don't know
how it is. You used to keep your true self when you went away from me,
but this time you've lost it. I suppose a fortnight has been too long.
Now go to sleep!"
"They've taken all the romance out of him," I said to Miss Torry, when I
got back to the sitting-room.
"Lor'!" she exclaimed. And up went her hands again until she looked like
a surprised angel. "The things that are going on in that house! They've
got the puppies all indoors, messing up the whole place; and the cook's
given notice, because Roland has been up into her room and made her
window so that it won't shut--in this weather, too!--because he wanted
to rig up a toy telephone between there and one of the servants' room
windows in the next house. He says the boy next door is allowed to do
what he likes, so he doesn't see why he himself shouldn't be. Did you
ever hear of such a thing?"
"Well, you'll have to take him out of my way to-morrow, Miss Torry. Take
him round and show him Paris. I'll work by myself. Strange, that he
should have altered so much in a fortnight! But that's just because he's
not commonplace. Commonplace people can't rise, but they can't sink,
either. It takes a person with something great in him to get down low."
So Little Yeogh Wough was taken by Miss Torry round Paris, and he also
went with me into shops and to do business in post offices, and quite
learned the ways of the place and of the people. But it made my cold
worse.
"Never mind," I said. "My having a bad cold like this means that my new
photographs will be good. I always pay for a good photograph with an
illness. I know I should pay for a good oil-painting portrait with my
death."
Little Yeogh Wough wrote and told my dear friend Mrs. Croy how he was
getting on. And Mrs. Croy responded by sending coals to Newcastle in the
shape of an enormous box of chocolates.
Mrs. Croy was a really darling creature of eighty-nine who dressed with
a view to looking nineteen, and she had a high opinion of Little Yeogh
Wough because, as she said, he was the only child living who had been
nice to her.
The fact of the matter was, that she was a difficult person for a child
to be "nice" to, for the reason that she apparently did her making-up
without looking in the glass, and so was often to be found with an
eyebrow coming down one side of her cheek and some rouge on her chin or
on her forehead. Irreverent children had been accustomed to make remarks
on these peculiarities, as also on the fact that the colour of her wig
changed every day; but the boy of my heart, who liked her, would not
have appeared to notice the matter if she had come before him without
her head. And for this she was so grateful that she loved him
passionately.
I loved her, too. It is astonishing how lovable women who make up badly
usually are.
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":
"Dancing, I'll pass de time away,
Fluttering my nimble toes,
While I'm waiting, weary waiting,
For de sossiest little girl I knows...."
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:
"Fear no more the heat of the sun nor the furious winter's rages."
"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.