the house are crumpled, and you've been most particular about getting a
smooth piece of string without any knots in it, and I heard you
remarking to your sister that it is a pity that labels are not made more
artistic."
He laughed again, but said nothing more. And I did not say anything
more, either. I waited until his second friend, whom he called "The
Father Confessor," came down to us on a visit in the house on the East
Coast, and I put a few discreet questions to him as we sat together
talking on the Chesterfield in the dining-room, late at night.
"I was so sorry that we could not get to the last Speech Day, Victor. It
was lawyers' business that kept me away. Nothing else should have done
so. I simply could not go that day, nor Roland's father either. I am
afraid Roland was very much disappointed. He seemed to hold on to our
being there this last time."
"Yes. He did hold on to it, I know. He'd been wanting you to come
particularly. It was such a triumph for him! And he'd deserved it, too.
He'd gone without sleep for three or four nights a week to get those
prizes and those honours."
"Had he?"
"Yes. Of course, even a wonderful fellow like Roland can't do
everything, and what with his school præpositorship and his school
magazine work and his debating and his looking after the house and his
cooking and his running everything and everybody he ever came across, he
hadn't time in the hours of the day to win examinations. So he used to
go to bed at eleven and then be down in his study again on the quiet at
one o'clock and work from then till the ordinary time to get up."
I caught my breath. Oh, my Little Yeogh Wough! It was reckless and
dangerous, but it was just what I should have expected of you. You're
not the boy to look at the clock to see if he's worked long enough and
leave a precious job unfinished because the hour for "Down tools!" has
struck.
But I returned to the business I had in hand.
"Of course, we knew that Roland wouldn't be lonely, even though we
couldn't get down for that day," I went on. "He had so many friends
there."
"Oh, no, he wasn't lonely! He was with Edward and his people most of
the day."
"Oh, yes, of course! Was Edward's father there?"
"No, not his father. His mother and sister came. I don't think they'd
meant to come, only they wanted to see you."
I laughed. "I remember, Roland told me they wanted to see me. I am sure
I don't know why. Is Edward's sister like Edward--very tall and straight
and rather formal?"
"Oh, no! She's not a bit like Edward. She's not like anybody else that
ever I knew. She's quite little and very clever. I dare say you'd like
her awfully."
I laughed again.
"You are funny, Victor. You're quite undoing my ideas of Edward's
sister. Does she wear long-bodied blouses, with very high necks--at the
back, anyhow--bought ready made from the drapers that advertise in the
daily papers?"
He looked puzzled. I went on:
"Does she wear a wrist watch and keep on jerking her arm up at an angle
to see the time by it? Does she have little bits of tulle bows tied
under her ears and little frills and odds and ends of ribbon wherever
they can be put, and a very ornamental waist-belt, and a general look as
if her highest idea of good style were to sit in the dress circle of a
theatre at a matinée?"
Poor Victor! It was no wonder that he looked at me in more and more
perplexity. Yet he did grasp something of what I meant, for he answered
gravely:
"I don't think she's that sort, a bit. She had a very pretty dress on on
Speech Day, and I think it was quite a Frenchy sort--the kind of thing
that Roland likes. And she doesn't wear bits of tulle and frills. She's
quite plain about the neck."
"Then she must be good-looking!" I exclaimed. And I added to myself:
"She must be a girl of fascination--a girl to be reckoned with!--and not
a mere stick to hang drapers' advertised wares upon."
The next day The Bystander slipped close to my side in the garden and
said:
"Mother, I've found out what book it is that Roland has sent to Edward's
sister. You see, the people in the shop where he got it asked me just
now if I thought he wanted to pay for it separately or if they should
put it down on the account. It's 'The Story of an African Farm.'"
I had a feeling as if something were clutching at my heart. I said a few
words in answer and then I went to the back drive and walked up and down
there by myself.
I was glad Little Yeogh Wough was out. I wanted to be apart from him and
to think.
"If he has sent Vera Brennan 'The Story of an African Farm,' then she
can't be the ordinary sort of girl," I thought. "She can't be of the
great army of those who play games and are always taking bodily
exercise, yet never by any chance do anything more useful than arrange
cut flowers. He could have passed on his way among thousands of these
without taking any notice of them. She must be a personality--one of the
few girls who can think and are not afraid to do it; one of the few who
know what real romance is and who, because they know this, will always
be able to marry as often as they like, no matter how small the number
of marriageable men may be, while other women stand around and gasp for
a husband in vain. And if she is this--then he is not wholly and only
mine now as he was a few weeks ago. He will never be wholly mine any
more."
"So we are in it. We are in the European Soup," I wrote to Little Yeogh
Wough in his Officers' Training Corps camp at Aldershot, when war had
been declared.
But he was beside me before my letter could have reached him.
"The War Office broke us up," he explained. "There was no room there any
more for boys who were only playing at soldiering. But I'm going to do
the real thing. I'm going to set about it to-morrow."
"Yes," I told him, "you must go. It is the right thing for you to do."
He looked at his father and heard from him again the same words, more
emphatically repeated: "Yes. It's the right thing for you to do."
He was very silent that evening, but it was very gaily and proudly that
he set out next morning to fling himself into the sudden feverish
activity of a certain garrison town not far away.
"He won't be long getting his commission," his father said. "His five
years in the Officers' Training Corps have taught him his work already."
But at the end of that day, and at the end of many another day that
followed, the Boy came back with a wistful disappointment written upon
his handsome face.
He always had the same story to tell--a story of having been welcomed
and encouraged when he had first presented himself and promised all that
his heart desired, so that only he passed the doctor's requirements.
He had laughed at first at the bare idea of meeting with any difficulty
in connection with the doctor. Those who had made him the promises had
been quite confident, too, on this point. What could there be wrong with
a splendid physique such as his?
"And then I failed in the eyesight test," he finished up. "It is
ridiculous, of course, that they should reject me for so little, because
I don't have to wear glasses now for anything, and no ordinary person
would know there was anything wrong with my eyes at all. I wonder if
this sort of thing is going to keep on repeating itself? One or two of
the officers suggested another doctor, but I suppose that as long as
that wretched test board is put up and they find I can't read the small
type on it at a given distance, one doctor will be the same as another."
He was walking up and down the room restlessly. His fine dark eyes--so
much too beautiful to have an eagle's sight--were sadder than ever in
their wistful mortification.
"You poor boy! You've always had everything so much your own way in life
that you can't understand being beaten back anywhere. But, you know, you
always say that you've never got anything important yet the very first
time you've tried for it."
"Oh, but this is different! And if I can't get into the Army, what am I
going to do? I can't go to Oxford. There'll be nobody there except
cripples. I should feel it a disgrace to be seen there. Just fancy my
walking about there, looking as fit as I do, when every other decent
fellow is fighting! What do you think people would think of me--yes, and
even say to me? Nobody would ever believe I've got anything the matter
with me, eyes or anything else, unless I wore a label round my neck. Oh,
Big Yeogh Wough, what am I going to do? You've no idea what it felt
like to-day to have to go out from among them--those officers who'd been
quite eager to have me with them."
He flung himself down heavily into a chair. He had not yet taken off his
overcoat and I could see that he was very tired. I bent over him and
kissed him.
"You dear big boy! I suppose it's just because of your strength that
you're always so piteous when anything doesn't go quite right with you.
You can always move mountains yourself and so it breaks you down to find
a mountain in your path that you haven't the right to try to move. Never
mind. Things will work themselves out all right."
"And to think that Edward has been passed!" he burst out. "He's sure of
his commission now. He's only got to wait for it. And I----! Look here,
I'll go and have another try to-morrow at a different place and if I'm
rejected again I'll go over and join the French army."
"Better offer to help Colonel Crompton here with the recruiting," put in
his father, quietly. "You'd be wearing your O.T.C. uniform and doing
useful work and through it you might get your chance."
It was a good idea, and the Boy saw it.
"Yes, I think I'll do that. I'll have a try at Bury St. Edmunds
to-morrow, and if the doctor there doesn't slip me through the eyesight
test I'll go round and help the dear old colonel and work my way in
sideways. After all, if I'm a good soldier and strong and healthy, what
on earth does it matter that I can't see the enemy coming behind bushes
five miles off? When it comes to that, one uses field glasses."
"That's the right way to look at it," I told him. "The bright side of
everything is really the truest side. That's why I'm sorry Miss Torry
isn't here now. She'd only have to cry out: 'Lor'! You've only got to
try twenty-three and three-quarter times more and you're sure to get
what you want.' That irrepressible sort of person is so helpful in
life--so different from Old Nurse's sort. Old Nurse would have said to
you: 'Well, Master Roland, I don't see how you can expect them to take
you, seein' as I've always told you as you've got an 'undredth part of
an inch more toe-nail on your right big toe than on your left.'"
The reference to toe-nails must have made him glance at my feet, for his
face suddenly brightened as he said:
"Oh, you've got my scarlet silk stockings on--the pair I gave you for a
birthday present when I was ten years old! They do look lovely. I'm so
glad you've put them on. Only just seeing them has taken all my
tiredness and bitterness away. They make life worth living again."
"You funny boy! How many people, do you think, would know what you mean
by that?"
"Not many, I dare say, but that's their fault, not mine. I always feel
so sorry for them--for the people who can't understand why the sight of
such things as scarlet silk stockings, and Parma violets, and black fox
fur, and blue hyacinths, and pink carnations, helps one to live."
"Sulphur carnations," I put in. "Sulphur yellow is the adored colour of
my womanhood, just as salmon pink was the adored colour of my childhood.
For years of my little girlhood I spent all my pocket money on either
salmon-pink ribbon or white narcissi. I would have gone without food or
clothes to get either of these things. Of course, I shouldn't say this
if anybody were here but ourselves. The servants would think me mad if
they heard me--just as they would think you either mad, or bad, or both,
for your joy in my scarlet silk stockings. I remember Old Nurse's
amazement when you bought them for me. She would have thought it more
natural for you to have bought me a satchel or a bottle of cheap
lavender water or something else quite ordinary and respectable.... But,
anyhow, I'm afraid the time for beautiful things is over for two or
three years. The war is going to grind us down very low before it's done
with."
He was so much brightened up that his failure to pass the eyesight test
again next day did not dismay him in the least. He offered his help to
the lovable colonel who was the recruiting officer for the district and
who was sorely overworked already, and was soon throwing his whole heart
into the business of bundling into His Majesty's Forces as many young
men as he could get hold of.
He began with our cook, who had always had a weakness for him.
"Joanna, your young man ought to enlist. He's such a splendid fellow.
The Army can't do without him."
"Oh, Master Roland!"
She began a string of objections and excuses. But Little Yeogh Wough got
his way, as he always did when there was no red tape to come up against.
"You seem to have quite forgotten that you want a commission for
yourself, Roland," I said to him after he had done a fortnight of
indefatigable recruiting work.
"Oh, no, I haven't. But I've found out that the best way to get the
thing you want is to work hard at something else, and then the other
thing falls into your lap. There was a Lord Chief Justice once--I forget
which one--who, when he was a boy, drove his father to despair because
he wouldn't study law but would go on the stage. But he ended up as Lord
Chief Justice a good deal quicker than if he had taken to the law at
first. I'm going to do that with my soldiering. I've got an idea. You
wait a bit. I'm going down to Doctor S---- to ask him to give me a
certificate of physical fitness. I shan't say a word about eyesight, and
he won't think of it. He's never heard a whisper of there being anything
wrong with mine. But he does know that I'm as tough as a young horse,
and he'll be glad enough to write down that he knows it."
Armed with this document, which was given him in all good faith, he went
to yet another garrison town, where he had come to know a major who was
going to be put in command of a new battalion. This major had taken a
great fancy to him; and the result was that one evening Little Yeogh
Wough came home and announced that at last he had got his heart's
desire.
"It's a certainty, Big Yeogh Wough. It can't go wrong now. It was that
certificate that did it. They never put me through any eyesight test at
all. Now I can look Edward Brennan in the face. Let us have him here for
a week."
I told him how glad I was. And it was true that I was glad, for his
whole look had changed.
But deep down in my heart I felt as if an iron hand were clutching at
me.
"Once I get the commission, I'll soon manage to get out to the Front,"
he laughed confidently.
"Yes," I said, and laughed too. But the iron clutch at my heart came
again.
"I must see about my outfit at once. And then I shall have to go into
rooms at Norwich to be with my battalion. I shall have to change out of
it later on if I find it's only going to be a Home Service one."
Even with all his energy about his outfit, his name was in the gazette
before his new uniform was ready. Yet it was not long before a Sunday
morning came when he made his first public appearance in the
neighbourhood as a second lieutenant, going to church with his sister to
show how the best quality cloth, the best cut, the best shade of khaki,
the best Sam Browne belt and all the other accessories could increase
the attractiveness of a boy with a fine figure and with that "dignity of
the watch-chain" sort of fascination about him which I have tried to
explain already.
"I don't agree with the people who say that khaki is not becoming," I
said to his father after he had gone. "It must be becoming, because,
since the war broke out, I've had a stronger and stronger impression
every day that England is full of good-looking men."
"I must see what Edward Brennan looks like in his khaki," I thought.
But Edward was still waiting for his commission and so was in his
ordinary clothes. But the thrill of the war was in him and it was a new
Edward who was with us now and sat at the piano, and with his long
fingers brought from the keys music that had a strange new meaning in
it.
"Edward, in a way I am sorry that you are going soldiering, too. It will
be a great pity if anything happens to you--because, if you live, you'll
be a great musician one day, when you wake up."
"When I wake up?"
"Yes. You're as cold as marble now. You want to thaw. But you're
beginning to thaw already. What is that sad, sweet thing you've been
playing over and over again this morning?"
"Oh, don't you know? It's my setting of Roland's poem, 'L'Envoi.'"
"Roland's poem? I didn't know he wrote any poems."
"No. He's afraid to show them to you, because he says they're not good
enough yet. But I liked this one so much that I couldn't help setting it
to music."
And he played the music over again, singing the words as he did so:
"Only a turn of head,
A good-bye lightly said,
And you set out to tread
Your manlier road.
But our youth's paths once met,
And think not we forget
How great a brother's debt
To you is owed.
Sweep onward! and though fame
Shall aureole your name,
Remember whence you came
In boyhood's days.
And in Life's wider years
Look back on hopes and fears,
Sweetened with Memory's tears,
And blame and praise."
When he had finished I had a lump in my throat and a mist before my
eyes, so that I could hardly see him as he sat at the piano.
A few minutes later I thought I heard Little Yeogh Wough come in. I went
to his room, but he was not there. There was a sheet from an exercise
book on the floor, which the wind that came in at the open window had
evidently blown off the table. I picked it up and looked at it, and saw
that the writing on it was a poem which the Boy had copied from a recent
number of the "Westminster Gazette."
I read the lines through carelessly at first; but when I came to the
third or fourth line I knew that if he was to get out to the Front and
get killed this poem would haunt me always. I found myself murmuring the
words over:
"I shall remember miraculous things you said
My whole life through;
Things to go unforgotten till I am dead;
But the hundredfold, adorable ways of you,
The tilt of your chin for laughter, the turn of your head,
That I loved, that I knew----
Oh, while I fed on the dreams of them, these have fled!
Words which no time can touch are my life's refrain;
But each picture flies----
All that was left to hold till I meet you again!
Your mouth's deep curve, your brows where the shadow lies,
These are the things I strive to capture in vain,
And I have forgotten your eyes----"
Another blinding mist of tears blotted out the last line, even as just
now in the drawing-room tears had blotted out the figure of Little Yeogh
Wough's friend sitting at the piano.
That night, after midnight, as I sat on the big sofa with the Boy and
his friend, I said suddenly:
"I didn't know you wrote poems, Roland. Why don't you let me see some of
them?"
"They're not good enough to show you. I suppose Edward has been telling
you I've written them. He oughtn't to have told you."
They were sitting one on either side of me. Edward laughed.
"Don't mind what he says. I'll send them to you to read," he said to me.
Then a demon of anger leapt up in the eyes of Little Yeogh Wough. He
looked dangerous as he flung himself across me and defied his friend.
"No, you won't send them. I don't mean mother to see them. They're not
good enough. They're not to be shown her. You understand?"
"Roland!" I exclaimed reproachfully.
When his friend had gone to bed he walked fiercely up and down the room
in which he was now alone with me.
"You can see what I feel, Big Yeogh Wough. I don't want you to see work
that I think is bad. And you know that home and you are something quite
apart from everything else with me. My best self is always here, but
I've had to bring out another self in my school life, or I couldn't have
got on in that life at all. And I don't want you to hear about that
other self. Any boy that comes here must come on condition that he
doesn't tell you."
"You ought to be very grateful to this particular boy who is here now,
for he has told me of all sorts of goodnesses in you--of your kindness
in helping other fellows less clever than yourself--helping them even to
compete against you--and of your great sense of justice. You have learnt
to rule, and I am glad, for now you will have to put your ability to the
test; and I am very proud to know that last Speech Day the Head thanked
you for the change for the better that you had worked in your house
since you had been an important boy there."
He came and sat down on the big couch beside me and leaned his head
against mine.
"Are you particularly fond of Edward's sister, Roland?"
"Of Vera Brennan? No, not particularly fond of her. I like her
tremendously. You would, too, if you knew her. She's not like other
girls. She's brilliant and can think for herself. She wants to be a
writer some day. But first she's going to Oxford. If it hadn't been for
this war we should have been there at the same time."
"Going to Oxford isn't the way for a woman to be a writer--except of
treatises. But that's beside the point. Are you getting to be fond of
her? Do you think you will ever be as fond of her as you are of me?"
"What are you talking about, Big Yeogh Wough? I'm only a boy yet and am
not likely to get fond of any woman, except in a comradely way. You know
that when the time comes for me to love a woman and think of marrying
her, I should like to find one like you if I could. But I'm not likely
to be able to do that. Yet, whether the woman be Vera or anybody else,
there won't be any question of whether I love you or her the better. You
and I have lived so much in each other's life that we're like one
person, and the woman I love will have to have you for a lover as well
as me, while she'll have to love you if she wants me."
"Does Vera Brennan know that I call you Little Yeogh Wough and that you
call me Big Yeogh Wough?"
"No. She knows a lot about me, but she doesn't know things like that."
"That's right. And now it's time you went to bed, or you will make me
so very late in coming to say good night to you."
"All right." He got up at once. "But you're not going to sit up working,
are you? I don't think you ought to in this East Coast house. What's the
good of their putting out the lighthouse light if you keep the light in
your turret blazing away? You see, we're as nearly opposite Germany as
we can be."
"Very well. I'll be good and go to bed by a candle hidden away behind a
curtain. It will be all the better for your father. There won't be any
fear of the light waking him up. He says he would have been in his grave
long ago if he kept the hours I keep. That may be, but I never find that
the people who go to bed at nine and get up at half-past eight are any
the healthier for it. I rather agree with that old financier who used to
see a good deal of us and used to say sometimes in the morning: 'I feel
quite out of sorts to-day. I always do whenever I go to bed earlier than
usual.'"
I went to his room half an hour later to say good night to him. He was
already in bed. Before I switched off his light I saw something in his
eyes which made me say:
"Roland, what are you thinking of? Is this the last time I shall come
and say good night to you before you go out to the Front--if you succeed
in getting out there?"
"Yes." He answered me in a very tender voice which no one else knew.
"You see, if you come up with me to London to-morrow we shall be
sleeping in different places--you at the hotel and I at Uncle
Jack's--and after that I shall be going straight to my rooms at Norwich.
And even if my battalion gets accidentally ordered to this town, I shall
have to sleep at headquarters. This place would be too far off. And I
don't suppose there'll be much leave going, because the battalion is so
raw and wants such a lot of training."
"What a splendid thing your five years' O.T.C. training has been for
you!"
"Yes. The O.T.C. major has written to the commanding officer of my
battalion and told him what he thinks of me as a trained soldier
already, and it seems to have been a pretty good opinion, so I don't
expect I shall be long getting out to the Front. I don't mean to be
long. I'll move heaven and earth to get out there. I know you won't try
to keep me back. You know, you said to me once, not very long ago, that
every man has two mothers, his flesh-and-blood mother and his country,
and he owes as much to the one as to the other. That's what makes that
American song: 'I didn't raise my son to be a soldier,' all wrong."
I had knelt down by his bedside again and was smoothing the mass of his
hair. We were silent for a long while and then I suddenly found myself
saying:
"I wonder if a mother's love is really all gold, as people say it is,
Little Yeogh Wough, or whether there isn't a good deal of the dross of
pride in it! Now, I would take off my skin and sit in my bones to keep
you from feeling cold, but, after all, that's because you are mine, and
I suppose I am selfish enough to think, though it's wrong to do so, that
what is mine is more precious than what is anybody else's. Of course, if
much of this pride comes in, it takes the holiness away from the love."
"I don't think you need trouble about that, when it's a question of you
and me," he returned.
I was still stroking his hair. And then something, though I could not
have told what, made me whisper to him:
"Say: 'Our Father, Which art in Heaven,' with me, Little Yeogh Wough."
I did not know then what he felt lately about these things. So much had
happened that might have changed him since I had caught a glimpse of the
ivory crucifix half hidden under other things in his drawer.
But, with his lips close to my face, he repeated the prayer with me.
I had left him about half an hour when a loud knocking came at the front
door. Without disturbing my husband I slipped some clothes on and went
downstairs, but could find no trace of either Little Yeogh Wough or
Edward.
Presently they both came in, in dressing-gowns and bedroom slippers, and
I learned that they had been guiding down to the sea some coast patrols,
new-comers to the locality, who had lost their way.
"What? Do you mean that you have been all the way down to the sea on
this bitterly cold and stormy night with nothing on but dressing-gowns
over your pyjamas and bedroom slippers on your bare feet?"
They laughed, and then I knew that nothing would hold either of them
back from the Front five minutes longer than was absolutely inevitable.
But the next day was a different kind of day for Little Yeogh Wough. For
he spent it in London--that London which he always loved, as I love it,
with a deep and undying devotion; and he found himself in the company of
men whose strength was in their brains, rather than in their bodies.
He began, directly I left him, by mischievously telegraphing to an
eminent novelist, who was fond of him, to meet him at a given spot in
town. It was the eminent novelist's busiest day of the week, on which he
never left home, but he obeyed the summons of the telegram, which bore
the sender's surname only, imagining, perhaps, that something had gone
very wrong. Anyhow, he was irate when he discovered that nothing more
important had required him than Little Yeogh Wough, desirous of showing
off his uniform.
He gave his admiration, none the less. Another and another, whom the boy
of my heart went to see, charmed him by their brilliance in return for
the quicker life which the mere sight and voice of him put into their
veins. He passed the afternoon at the Stores, doing as much in helping
the sale of military outfits for other people as in buying what he
himself needed. And he passed the evening with me at my hotel, with
friends of whom one, Mr. Clement Shorter, had known him by daily sight
and greeting since the bright years of his earliest boyhood.
He sat and drank in the eager talk of books. And at twelve o'clock, when
the never to be forgotten little party had broken up and he was due at
his uncle's flat, he came and planted himself in front of me and said:
"Big Yeogh Wough, when this war is over, I'm not going in for the Indian
Civil Service. I'm not going in for anything that will take me away from
London and you and the life that you live. London and the brain force of
London have got into my blood to-day. When I come back I'm going to stop
here and use here in this city all the powers that I've got. You will
see."
When he was leaving me he turned back and said with sudden wistfulness:
"I've got to go down to-morrow, but you could stop in London till
Friday, couldn't you? You see, Edward's going to bring his sister up to
town on Friday and I should like you to meet her. I dare say I could get
up again for a few hours and we might have a little tea-party
somewhere--perhaps at the Criterion."
He spoke quite lightly, as if my refusal would not matter in the very
least. But I looked at his sad, deep eyes and at the grace of his figure
in its new khaki, and I did not refuse.
"Very well," I agreed. "I will stay over until Friday. I am really quite
curious to see this Vera Brennan who is so utterly unlike all other
girls."
"That's good of you. It's settled, then. I'll manage to come up."
And so it came about that a quarter-past four on the next Friday
afternoon found me in the vestibule of the Criterion, looking at the
moving throngs of men, nearly all in khaki, and of women who were
already for the most part in black. And I wondered again, as I have
wondered all my life, why these so-called bright scenes are sadder far
than any funeral, and why black does succeed in looking pathetic on the
young, whereas it only looks dismal on the old.
It is only a mild sympathy that stirs in one when one sees a very old
woman in widow's crape. One feels that the fitness of things is not
outraged. But when one sees a young widow--oh, then, one knows that
there is a story of romance and horror and anguish lurking behind the
black, and first a pang of pity goes through one's heart, and then a
flood of tenderness rises in one's soul for the girl who could only just
have gained her womanhood's best joys when she lost them.
Little Yeogh Wough, who had been shopping for himself, was by this time
crossing the floor towards me, his face aglow, his step strong, his
whole air vital and electric. At the same moment little Miss Torry, whom
I had notified of our intention to be here, appeared like a small
whirlwind and grasped first my hand and then the Boy's, as if she meant
to wrench them from our wrists and carry them away with her as trophies.
"Oh, you dear boy! Let me look at you. What a size you are! And how the
khaki does suit you! And what a lovely shade of khaki it is--a greeny
shade! Some people do have such horrid, mustardy things. Oh, dear me! I
wish there weren't so many people here, so that I could get a better
look at you. I shall hug you in a minute before everybody--and then,
what will people say? And your moustache, too! Why, it's quite golden!
and I always did expect it to come out black and make you look like a
conspirator."
She was so very tiny and the boy was, in comparison, so very big that it
was amusing to see them together. But there was a great softness in his
eyes as he looked at her, for he had had Miss Torry guiding him in the
way he should go for nearly thirteen years of his life, and every
scolding she'd given him, and every extra extravagance she had denied
him when he had been at school had endeared her to him unutterably.
And then there entered the girl whom I had come to meet--the girl to
whom he had sent letters that had taken hours to write, and a parcel
containing one book which had required a whole morning for its making-up
and addressing.
I saw someone very small, very slight, very delicate-faced and yet very
resolute, with amethyst-like eyes that looked straight into my eyes,
asking me mute questions concerning the soul of the boy who had been
mine only till now, but was not likely to be mine only for ever.
She was accompanied by an aunt, and the little tea-party went off very
successfully, with Little Yeogh Wough glowing with pride and happiness,
and his sister, who had come with me, taking things all in, as she
always did. Not one of us breathed a word as to what we had really come
there for--namely, to examine each other and see how we liked each
other; but the verdict was an all-round satisfactory one, and in the end
we all got into a taxicab together and Miss Vera Brennan sat on my knee.
"How tiny you are!" I said playfully.
"Yes. I was saying to Roland once how sorry I am that I'm so small, and
he said he liked small women."
She was going to buy a hat, and I set her and her aunt down at the hat
shop. Little Yeogh Wough went with them to help her in making her
choice--or, rather, to show her how well he could choose a hat for her
even this first time.
I did not watch him go into the shop, because at that moment there came
along a marching phalanx of new recruits, most of whom had not yet got
their uniforms; men of London, who had given themselves up to strive and
suffer for their country and who came along without panoply or music,
and with no need of either because of the music that was in their
hearts, and that made their eyes glow and their steps ring firm and
true.
If I had been a man I should have bared my head to them as they passed.
I honoured them, I reverenced them, I loved them, with an honour and a
reverence and a love that half choked me.
That evening, when Little Yeogh Wough came back to me at the hotel, he
asked me in a quite careless tone how I liked Miss Brennan.
"Oh, I like her very much!" I answered him. "She is good-looking and
sincere--and good looks and sincerity go a very long way. I hope you let
her know that it was I who had trained you to be a good judge of hats
and of most other articles of the feminine wardrobe?"
"Oh, of course I've told her all about that!" he said with a laugh.
He had worn khaki five months and a half, and had worked hard, and
become a full lieutenant and been entrusted at nineteen with difficult
Home Service jobs that would not have been given to many a man of
thirty, when one day he came to us in the East Coast house with such a
glow on his face as I had never seen there before.
"I believe I am going to get out to the Front at last," he announced.
"Lady Geraldine Desmer and Captain Jarvice both know influential people
at the War Office, and it will be very surprising if between them I
don't get what I want. Captain Jarvice is going to take me up to the War
Office with him to-morrow. He says he isn't going to wait about here in
England much longer, and at the same time he's promised me that he won't
go unless I go with him. And he really does seem to have influence, so I
believe I'm all right now. Besides, Gretton's got out there, so I'm
bound to go. There's a fate in it."
So, two days later, the brave young feet ran up the steps of the house
eagerly again, and the fine young figure met me in the hall with a
leaner figure beside it.
He waited for Captain Jarvice to tell me what there was to tell. And
that charming cavalry officer did tell me, while he held out both his
hands to me, looking at me with eyes that had a mist of moisture in
them.
"I've got them to take him. We're both going out with the 7th
Melchesters in five days' time. I've been wondering whether you'll bless
me for this or curse me."
"Roland, go and tell your father."
When they had gone, an hour later, his father and I and his sister sat
and looked at each other and were very silent.
The next day the Boy came again, this time bringing his luggage--all the
extra things which he had had in his Norwich rooms and could not take to
the Front. There were things to be locked in his trunks and things to be
packed on his wardrobe shelves, and certain especially precious
treasures which he poured in a heap into his private drawer in that same
capacious piece of furniture.
"I've lost the key of this drawer, so I can't lock it separately from
the whole wardrobe, but you'll see that nobody goes to it, won't you,
Big Yeogh Wough?" he said wistfully as he pressed down a few unimportant
articles of clothing on the top of the little piles of letters and
notebooks which he had just heaped up.
"Yes," I promised him. "I shall not go to it and your father will not,
and Clare will not. And there's no one else."
I was tenderly wrapping up his sword in folds of silk as I spoke; his
sword, that had been used for show and was not wanted for the hard and
bitter work of fighting in earnest.
He went on talking as he went on packing in things on the top of the
letters:
"I've told Vera Brennan that you won't mind her writing to you
sometimes. You won't, will you?"
"No. Of course I shan't mind. I shall be glad."
I felt suddenly grateful to fate for the other woman who loved him, too.
He finished his packing and we went into the dining-room for tea.
"I shan't be able to stay all through tea. I've got to leave in ten
minutes, to catch the train back to Norwich and clear out of my rooms
there, so as to go to the Melchesters at Maldon. I shall feel a stranger
among them, and no mistake. But I like the colonel, and that's
something."
He spoke quite bravely and with an attempt at his usual gaiety, but it
was easy to see that there was something not quite right about him.
Eagerly though he had striven to go, he yet was not going without a
pang.
But it was not the coward's pang--Heaven be thanked! There was nothing
of fear in it.
Downstairs in the kitchen department of the house there was a great and
unwonted silence that made itself felt even in our rooms. The servants
knew and were sorry. One of them had known him for eight years, another
for four and yet another for two; and their unnatural silence and
stillness had a meaning which struck a chill to my heart.
Then, the ten minutes being over, he got up and kissed us good-bye all
round. A curious look came on his face as he saw the tears in his
father's eyes brim over. He went out very suddenly, walking a little
blindly.
He would have no one go to the station with him. For one thing, he was
not going there immediately, and, secondly, he always hated being seen
off by anyone that he loved.
And six days later, at eight o'clock in the morning, a telegram came to
us, sent by him from Folkestone:
"Am crossing to-night."
As I have said before, I buried my face in the pillow and sobbed and
sobbed and sobbed.
For it is in the beginning that the great Fear comes and grips and
chills.
I was glad Old Nurse was dead, and also Tita, the black Skye terrier.
The dog had loved him so! She had always been haggard and wretched when
she had seen his luggage packed for going back to school at the
beginning of each term, and now she would surely have known somehow that
he had gone to the war.
"Oh, Little Yeogh Wough!" I cried out in my heart. "I have guarded you
so much always--so much!--and now I can't guard you any more. Now
already your glad young feet are marching over French ground, carrying
you on--on--perhaps to your death."
And then began for us all a different life; a life of heart hunger. We
hungered to hear the Boy's laugh, to hear the peculiar call he gave when
he wanted his younger brother to help him with his dressing, or his
half-mischievous, half-playfully tender inquiry of his father as to
whether he could have the first supply of the hot bath water. We
wandered about like lost souls until his first letter came. And one
vivid sentence in it showed us that he had reached the danger zone:
"It has given me a thrill to-night to see the German flares go up like a
truncated dawn."
CHAPTER XIII
THE SECOND GERMAN GIFT
"There's a sob on the sea,
And the Old Year is dying:
Borne on night-wings to me
There's a sob on the sea.
And for what could not be
The deep world's heart is sighing.
There's a sob on the sea,
And the Old Year is dying."
Little Yeogh Wough.
Sometimes in the midst of my aching, tearing anxiety I found myself
laughing out suddenly at the remembrance of some of the Boy's delightful
extravagances; at how, for instance, one night when his battalion was
stationed about three and a half miles away from us, he had driven up
all that distance and back in a taxicab at midnight in order to get
eighteenpence in ready money for a tip for the cab driver. He had been a
short journey in the cab already, but the cost of that was going to be
put down on an account. He wanted, however, to give a good tip, and,
having no small change, he took the cab another seven miles to do it.
Then there had been an occasion when, needing a piece of stout wire, he
had secretly but relentlessly removed it from the inside of the handsome
and nearly new piano, substituting a stout bootlace to act in its place.
For one who had always been responsible far beyond his years--more
responsible than most elderly men--he had astonishing little fits of gay
irresponsibility in which he fell foul of the authority of everybody
except his Big Yeogh Wough.
Perhaps it was these very gleams of wildness that won for him the
devotion of the servants in the house.
Once a week everything else in the household routine had to give way to
the making of his cake. The cook kneaded her heart's love into it in
spite of his having robbed her of her young man for the benefit of the
Army, and the others looked on at the making with sorrow and fear in
their honest eyes. They might not agree with each other on all points at
all times, but they always agreed about him; and so the family cake and
the kitchen cake became poor and anæmic in order that the cake destined
for the Front might be rich enough to put any young officer into a state
of bilious inefficiency.
Our anxiety to obey official instructions as to describing the contents
of parcels led him to write a protest to his sister as Chief
Commissariat Officer:
"MY DEAR BYSTANDER,
"I wish you wouldn't apologise all over the outside of my parcels
for what is inside them. Why put 'Only six buns and two dried
haddocks'? Or: 'Merely a little dill water'? Can't you put
'Provisions' only? Won't that satisfy the regulations?"
The sending out of his silver identity disc and chain was an agonising
experience. On the face of it there is nothing very tragic about a flat
bit of silver with a man's name and regiment engraved on it. But what it
stands for! Oh, heaven, what it stands for!
I knew what it stood for as I looked at it. It stood first and foremost
for the fact that the boy who in himself was all earth and all heaven to
me was in the army only one among many thousands--perhaps among many
hundreds of thousands. It stood for a fearful confusion in which masses
of men might get inextricably mixed up so that none could know who his
fellow was; and it stood for a field on which there were many dead
lying, and for grim figures walking about among those dead and depending
for their identifications on some token worn by the still shapes whose
lips would speak no more.
All this passed through my mind while I packed up the little disc and
chain. I had had to order a very long chain so that it might slip easily
over the Boy's big lion-cub head.
"After all, I'm making too much of it," I told myself. "What is the
identity disc but a mere convenience? Haven't I hung one of my own cards
on to a button of my dress sometimes in Paris, when I was going to drive
about alone in their dangerous cabs?"
And I laughed and went to look for something vulgar to put on the
gramophone to cheer myself up.
Since he had gone away we had had no music. We had all been too restless
to play the piano and any of the ordinary gramophone records would have
brought us memories of him too keen for us to bear. But now suddenly I
remembered a dozen records hidden away under a sofa because I had judged
them on a first trial to be uninteresting. The Boy had known nothing of
them, so they would not torture me with thoughts of him.
With some difficulty I pulled out the uppermost one of the dozen, dusted
it and put it on the gramophone.
It was Henschel's "Morning Hymn," sung by Gervase Elwes.
Hurriedly trying the thing in a gay mood many months ago, I had thought
it commonplace and dull. I had never taken the trouble even to hear it a
second time. The name of the singer had meant nothing to me, because I
am too deeply a lover of music ever willingly to go to a concert. I had
heard him once or twice in love songs on the gramophone and had been
struck in some odd way by the fact that in those love songs it was a
gentleman who was pleading and adoring. There is such a difference
between a bounder's love song and a gentleman's, even though the bounder
may have the best voice that ever came from a masculine throat.
For, just as a man has to be better turned out in personal appearance
than a woman in order to look all right, so he has to be better dressed
and finished off inside in order not to do things in a shoddy way. For
the bounderishness of a bounder betrays itself in every little thing he
does--in the way he smiles, the way he comes into a room, the way he
takes his overcoat off and puts it on, the way he touches a piano, the
very way he breathes and speaks.
So, now, remembering that I had heard Gervase Elwes sing a love song as
if the man really cared and not as if he were a florid windbag who would
throw the woman off at the first convenient opportunity, I sat down
patiently to listen to the "Morning Hymn."
But after the first few moments I started up, amazed and thrilled.
It was not the singer that mattered. It was the music.
I did not know what the words were. I do not know now what they are. But
the music was the music of this war.
The room in which I stood faded from before my eyes and in its place I
saw a battlefield in the grey dawn light, with the dead lying in
hundreds upon it, most of them with their clear-featured, boyish faces
upturned to that pitiless daybreak. And among those upturned faces was
the face of Little Yeogh Wough--very white, very set, very calm. And
over in the east, where the sun would rise, there was a radiance that
was not yet of the sun and yet was warmer than the chill grim greyness
of the dawn. It was a light shed by the presence of a great Archangel,
whose arms, outspread, as it were, upon the clouds, enfolded and blessed
the dead as they lay beneath, while his face, uplifted to a higher
heaven, besought the pity of the great God of the Universe for the
agonies of the nations passing through the awful purgative ordeal of
War.
And over all there brooded such an adoration as forced one to one's
knees with one's forehead bowed to the ground. And I knew as I looked--I
knew even in my own agony--that the things which those boys had suffered
and the other things which they had given up had not been suffered and
given up in vain.
Oh, what is the use of trying to put the thought of him out of my mind?
It is impossible. Everything I do--everything I touch or look
at--reminds me of him.
I took up a casual book of poems and the first lines that I saw brought
fresh tears to my heart, if not to my eyes:
"Four ducks on a pond,
A grass-bank beyond,
A blue sky of spring,
White clouds on the wing:
What a little thing
To remember for years ...
To remember with tears!"
"It's no use," I said to myself. "The fear meets me everywhere. It's no
good my trying to shirk it. I'll go in and see Mrs. Orme."
Mrs. Orme was an unhappy mother of an only son, who had heard on the
night of last Christmas Day the news that her treasure had been taken
from her. She had been expecting him home, just as we are expecting
Little Yeogh Wough now, and had kept the Christmas dinner waiting until
ten o'clock. Then they had gone on with the feast--a veritable feast,
prepared for the hero who was expected--and, simply by way of a pretty
thought, had lifted their champagne glasses and drunk to the soldiers
who had fallen in the war.
Little had they thought that they were drinking to their own idol!
I had not been to the house in all the months that had passed since. I
had contented myself with writing a letter of sympathy, not having the
courage to go and offer to that poor father and mother comfort that
could be no comfort. But now I went and heard the whole pitiful story
and was shown the still more pitiful clothes with the bullet holes in
them, and the identity disc and the wrist watch and the cigarette case
and the periscope and all the other things that the War Office kindly
sends back to the homes of fallen officers.
I got away as soon as I could, promising to come again soon and bring
the lonely-hearted mother a photograph of my Little Yeogh Wough. I went
round with the photograph five days later and told the servant that she
need not announce me to Mrs. Orme, as I would go up and find her by
myself if, as they said, she was alone in her own sitting-room.
I went very softly along the corridor. The door of the sitting-room
looked shut, but yielded to a touch and slipped open. I heard a sound of
low sobbing, and looked in.
Mrs. Orme was sitting by a table with her arms flung out across it and
her head bowed upon them, with her face hidden. In between the sobs
half-smothered words were breaking from her and I caught them:
"Oh, Harry, I'm so poor without you! I'm so poor without you! What's the
good of anything, now that you're gone? Oh, Harry, come back to me! Come
back to me!"
I went back along the corridor and down the stairs and home.
I would send the photograph by post or by a messenger. Not for the
whole world would I have let her know that I had seen her in an hour
like this.
But people take their grief differently. One young widow that I knew
attacked hers with a fountain pen and got the better of it valiantly by
writing screed after screed, not only to her relatives and friends, but
even to her remotest acquaintances.
I don't myself think that any letter with deep feeling in it should ever
be written with a fountain pen. Love letters should certainly never be
written with one. Fountain pens and passion are mutually contradictory.
At just about this time there came a bright gleam in the darkness of our
suspense. Captain Jarvice, who had been sent home with a slight shoulder
wound three or four weeks before, appeared suddenly in our midst.
"You'll have the Boy home soon on his first leave," he told us. "He's
getting on finely out there. He's a born soldier, that boy is, as I've
always said. I'm not the only person that says so, either. The colonel
says so, too. He's got great brains and great courage both together, and
his men know it and will follow him anywhere. You can trust the men to
know what an officer is worth."
"I hope he will never get the V.C.," I said with a shiver.
"What?" The dear captain stared at me.
"Oh, you know what I mean! Nobody honours the Victoria Cross more than
I do, but it is the military form of Extreme Unction. I want him to do
things that deserve it, but not to get it. Only about one man out of
every hundred who get it ever lives on safely afterwards. If he doesn't
die in the actual winning of it, then the Law of Compensation strikes
him a little later, as in the case of Warneford. No! Dearly though I
love bravery, I myself am not brave enough to want my Boy to win the
Victoria Cross."
"Well, even if he doesn't happen to win it himself, he's pretty sure to
be the cause of some other fellow's winning it. I tell you, he's the
best soldier in the whole battalion, and if he were to be killed
to-morrow without having had the chance to show all the grit that's in
him--the chance to hold his trench single-handed against a horde of
Germans--he'd still have done so much by his wonderful influence to
stiffen up his men that they'd stand like lions, months after he was in
his grave, just because of the memory of him. That's the stuff he's made
of. As soon as he gets into the trench, with his gay laugh and the Life,
sheer Life, breaking out of every pore of him, all the discomforts and
difficulties seem to vanish."
"Hasn't he sometimes given way himself?" I asked. "Hasn't he sometimes
been very tired and almost broken up?"
"Oh, yes--sometimes! But he never minds being tired himself. It was
having to urge the tired men on that hurt him, and having to make them
work in the trenches when they ought to have rested. He would like to do
half their work for them, if he could; but as he can't, he does the next
best thing--he puts heart into them to do it. Oh, he loves his men as
much as they love him!"
"He's Mess President, isn't he?"
"I should think he was! And such a cook! He says he's always been fond
of cooking, though he's never had much chance to do it. The day before I
got hit he made some lovely caper sauce with half a bottle of capers and
my tooth-powder. He's a regular schoolboy still; even a troublesome one
sometimes."
I laughed.
"I expect you find that he wants to put things to all sorts of uses they
were never meant for, don't you?"
"I should just think he does. If a new trench mortar comes along, you'd
think it would be just a new trench mortar and there would be an end of
it; but that's not so with him. He wants to take it to bits and see if
it can't be used for something quite different. But his ideas are
sometimes quite good. Two or three months ago, after we'd had a
particularly dirty time, he went and got some factory vats and arranged
them as baths, and it just happened that the Prime Minister came along
unexpectedly when he and two other subalterns were in the vats with
nothing whatever on but their identity discs."
I laughed again. Oh, if I could only hear him call out here in this
house now, as he had done so often before:
"Father, can I have a hot bath?"
"You've no idea what a comfort a good wash is when you're thoroughly
tired out and caked with filthy mud from head to foot," Captain Jarvice
went on.
Yes, I had an idea. I was thinking how tenderly I would bathe the tired
feet of Little Yeogh Wough if I were near him now after his long
marches; those feet that I had kissed so often when they were the feet
of a small child.
And again I feel so glad that he had such a happy childhood. My own
people used to say that it was a waste to buy the children the
extravagantly costly toys they had. But I'm glad now--very glad.
"He'll be adjutant presently, you'll see," said Captain Jarvice, keeping
on his own line.
I laid my hand very softly against his wounded shoulder.
"Captain Jarvice, can't you see that in spite of all its horror this war
has done some good? It has made men and women of us all. You don't hear
people complaining of pin-pricks now, as they used to do. And it has
given us all hearts, instead of only a gizzard in the heart's place."
A week or two later Little Yeogh Wough himself came home on that first
leave to which his father and his sister and his naval cadet brother and
I had been looking forward with such panting eagerness.
"Why, you look like a German, Roland!" was the frank greeting of that
younger brother, standing up in the hall to welcome him with all the
self-confidence of one who wore the dark blue of the premier Service.
"I do, do I? That's because I've got my hair cropped, I suppose. And I
expect you think a lot of yourself because you've got into the Navy. But
anyhow, here I am, and I'm not a German, whatever I may look like."
With his arm round me and mine round him, he moved across the hall,
giving his gay little greetings that had a catch in the throat behind
them. There was an answering catch in his father's throat, and a little
tremble in all our voices. Then we noticed at last how deadly tired out
he looked. He laughed when we told him of it.
"I've been on my feet for forty-eight hours--and in any case I never
manage to get more than four hours' sleep a night, even in billets. But
a good sleep here to-night will soon put me right. I think I'll have a
hot bath now and go to bed directly after dinner. You'll come and see me
in bed, mother?"
We had dinner early, for his sake, and it was hardly more than
half-past nine when he called me and told me he was ready for me to come
in.
He was not in bed yet, however, but only sitting down, half undressed,
in the midst of all the disturbed treasures of his room. The doors and
drawers of his wardrobe stood open, as did also the drawers under his
toilet glass, and one or two trunks which he had pulled out from beneath
the bed.
"It's very good to be back again and see all the dear old things." He
nodded at the general confusion. "You don't know how _I_ think of them
when I'm out there."
"But you don't hate being out there?"
"No. Because I'm in the right place. It's my duty to be there. I should
hate myself if I were not there. You wouldn't have me anywhere else,
would you?"
"No, Little Yeogh Wough, I wouldn't have you anywhere else. I couldn't
have the boy who has been the pride of my life anywhere else now but in
the fighting line. I am so proud of you, because I know you are a
splendid soldier. To be adjutant at your age--why, it's wonderful!"
He glanced half backward at me, smiling. Something in his eye startled
me.
"Roland! Do you know that you looked almost wild at that moment?"
"Did I? I'm sorry. I'm afraid I've unlearned a lot of civilisation.
I've thrown over a lot of prejudices, too. I've come to have a great
respect for the Colonials. I always did think a heap of the Canadians,
but still not enough. And I used to think the Australians a touchy
people, but now I know they're not. Oh, I'm a different boy in some ways
from the boy who went out, Big Yeogh Wough!... What have you been
writing out those lines of Laurence Binyon's for?"
He had caught sight of my large black handwriting on a sheet of paper
lying on his table.
"Oh, those lines from the 'Dirge for the Dead'? I copied them out of
your book this morning to send in to Mrs. Orme, to comfort her about
poor Harry. I forgot them."
Little Yeogh Wough read the lines aloud, very softly:
"They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old,
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them----"
I slipped to my knees beside him and laid my head against his shoulder.
"Would they comfort you if I were to be killed?" he asked.
"Yes, they would--as much as anything could."
His eyes looked into mine curiously.
"What will you think in the years to come if I go down in this war, Big
Yeogh Wough?"
"What shall I think? Well, first of all, I shall be proud. I shall
honour you very much--more than if you had lived to make yourself a
king. But, just because you are you, I shall think it is a waste unless
you get your death in doing a little more than an ordinary man would do.
Look at your muscular body! I've thought of the wonder of it ever since
the day when I first saw you boxing. What's the good of it in this war?
It's no more good to resist flying bullets or shell splinters than an
old tottering man's body. That's where I should feel bitter. These times
are women's times and this war of machinery might as well be carried on
by women, for all the good that male muscle can do in it. And yet they
go and take the pick of the boys and let a stray bit of shell finish off
in a second a splendid human creature whose mind might have been the
driving force of the nation in a few years to come! That's where the
pity of it would be if anything happened to you."
"But nothing is going to happen to me. You forget my lucky lock."
He lifted my hand and guided it to the curious little white patch at the
side of his cropped head.
"You forget, too, that the fellow at school who knew all about palmistry
told me he was sure I was not going to get killed till I was close on
sixty. So, you see, I shall be quite safe in this war. They're not
likely to add one more to the noonday strokes of the old School bell for
me."
"The strokes of the old School bell? What do you mean?"
"Oh! Haven't you heard? The School bell tolls once at noon every day for
every Old Boy who has lost his life in this war. They've got up to
fifty-two strokes already and it's sure to go mounting up now by leaps
and bounds. There are so many of us out there fighting."
Again I was struck by his tired-out look. I drew myself from his hold
and got up from my knees.
"You must go to bed now," I told him. "I will go away for ten minutes
and when I come back I must find you in bed."
He obeyed me as he had obeyed me when he was a child. I heard a great
noise of shutting doors and drawers and box lids, and when I went in,
exactly at the end of the ten minutes, he was lying between the sheets,
luxuriously stretched out.
"Oh, the joy of being in a real bed again! I expect I shall sleep till
eleven or twelve o'clock to-morrow. Then I shall have the rest of the
day with you and shall go up to town and meet Vera Brennan next day;
that is, if she can come up from her home. I want to buy a dagger, too,
for hand-to-hand work in the trenches, and a few other things."
"Oughtn't you to have sent Vera a telegram to-night?"
"No. To-morrow will do. Oh, by the way, Big Yeogh Wough, have you got
any new clothes to show me?"
"No." I laughed as I shook my head. "I couldn't have afforded them now
in war time, even if I'd wanted them--and I haven't felt I wanted them
with you away and in danger."
He drew my hand into his, and I stayed beside him with my head resting
on his pillow, until he had fallen into a heavy sleep.
How boyish his face looked as he slept! and as I drew my hand from his
and moved away from his bedside, turning off the electric light and
leaving him in a full flood of August moon radiance, I could have
fancied that I heard voices singing softly in the air around me:
"They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old"--
I stole back and kissed his hair. Oh, human love! why must it be always
pain--pain--pain?
He was his old bright self again next day, when, having walked with us
all, he lay across my bed and laughed as he read me little French fairy
stories while I put things straight in the room.
"It's like the old days, isn't it, when you used to lie across my bed
and I taught you French while I brushed my hair? That reminds me that I
met an officer last week who said he'd heard you were amazingly good at
getting what you wanted out of the French farmer people round about
you. He was a man of quite thirty-five, by the way, and I asked him if
he didn't think he ought to marry before he went back to the Front. And
what do you think he answered me? He rubbed his fingers through his
hair, and reddened and said: 'Well, I've always been fonder of outdoor
amusements.' So, you see, falling in love and getting married are indoor
amusements. I suppose they are, really--only it sounded very funny."
"Oh, by the way, Big Yeogh Wough, can't you telephone up North to Vera
Brennan's people to-morrow and ask them to let her come here till
Monday? Say you'll be going up yourself with her and me on Monday."
"Are you getting fonder of her?"
"I don't know. I shan't know till I see her again. There's only one
thing I do know and that is that absence never makes the heart grow
fonder. I should like to ram that proverb down the throat of the man who
invented it."
So the girl with the amethyst eyes came down to our house by the eastern
sea.
There was only Sunday for her, since she came late on Saturday evening
and we were all going up to London on Monday morning. But that Sunday
was enjoyed to the uttermost.
It was so strange to see Little Yeogh Wough with her! No wonder his
sister and his young brother looked on in frank bewilderment,
remembering that he had been simply a masterful schoolboy until the
time of his putting on together of khaki and a moustache!
What a forcing power this war is! It changes people's ages as it changes
their addresses, and that is saying a great deal.
At twelve o'clock that night I rose from the big old sofa where I had
been sitting with the Boy and Vera Brennan, and said to them both:
"It is time we all went to bed now. That early train in the morning is
really very inconveniently early, as you will find out."
The two of them looked at me and then at each other. Then the Boy
laughed.
"You know, Vera, it's not a bit late for us in this house. Two o'clock
is more like our time. But I'll go to bed, anyhow, and you can stay here
and say what you want to say."
He was gone before I could say a word. And I was left alone with the
girl with the amethyst eyes.
I got up from the sofa and walked up and down the room. It was a
handsome room, large, many-windowed and high, but strangely gloomy. The
electric light was so heavily shaded that there were grim corners. One
might have thought that the wings of the Dark Angel hovered in the
recesses, as he waited--waited--waited. And, though the month was
August, there came up from the sea, hardly more than a stone's-throw
away, a sobbing that had something so much like human grief in it that
it made one understand how it was that in the ominous spring of 1914 the
village people of Russia kept on saying that they heard the earth crying
and that there would be war.
Vera Brennan's small head had sunk lower and lower. She spoke to me
without looking at me:
"You know I love Roland, don't you?"
"Yes," I answered her. "I know you love him."
"I can't help it," she said almost piteously. "I never loved anyone
before. I never thought I should love anyone at all. My mind was all on
other things. But he woke me up. I loved him directly I saw him and
heard him speak. Of course, I know he's very young, but with him age
doesn't seem to matter. He's a grown man in his mind and heart. He's
everything to me now--everything."
I said nothing, but kept on walking up and down the room. She went on,
more and more appealingly:
"He knows I'm saying all this to you. You see, he's told me all about
you. He said that if I loved him I must love you, too, because you and
he were like one life. And that is why I want to say this to you--that I
love him so very much that I want to think of him more than of
myself--that, if you think it would be better for him that I should
give him up and all my own life's happiness with him, I can do it and I
will do it. Yes, I will find strength to do it--if you say I must."
She had stretched out her arms towards me from the deeper gloom in which
she sat. And suddenly I realised, that, small and flowerlike and fragile
though she was, she was not a girl who was going to take my treasure
from me, but a woman who was asking me to let her share with me the
pride and the anguish of living under the black shadow of Fear that had
darkened my life for four months past.
I turned and went to her quickly and sat down on the sofa beside her and
took her into my arms. We did not speak a word, but we stayed there like
that for a long, long time--until the Boy's voice suddenly startled us:
"What are you doing here all this time? It's three o'clock. You will
both be ill."
"Roland! I thought you were in bed and asleep."
"No. I tried to lie down, but I couldn't. I've been walking up and down
the corridor."
He was stooping over us both, drawing us up. His boyish face had become
suddenly the face of a man, his voice was the voice of a man, and his
touch and his manner had a man's power and a man's dignity.
It was nearly four o'clock when I went to say good-night to him.
The next day in London was like a dream in which things happened with
the speed of flashes. It was only at midnight that the Boy and I got any
private talk together. His room adjoined mine at the hotel where we were
staying for the night, and he came in to me to bring me an offering of
sulphur carnations and to show me the dagger he had bought and his
miraculously tiny medical outfit.
"Why were you so late for the dinner?" I asked him. For he and I had had
a dinner engagement and he had kept dinner waiting for at least an hour.
"I didn't feel I could go anywhere and smile and talk to people who
didn't understand, just after seeing Vera off at Euston. I should have
liked to come straight back to you and talk to you quietly all the
evening. Look here, let me fasten these carnations on you where I want
you to wear them, just as I used to do before the war!"
"But I shall be going to bed in half an hour!"
"That doesn't matter. It's worth while for you to wear them for half an
hour. Tell me what you think of the dagger. It's for hand-to-hand work
in the trenches, where there isn't room to use a bayonet."
"Ah!" I took the newly bought thing in my hand and looked at it. "When
it's done its work bring it back to me without cleaning it. I shall
want to keep it always like that."
"And here's my little medicine chest. Don't they make things up
splendidly? Here's some morphia. You see, many a fellow that's not very
badly wounded does himself a lot of harm by wriggling about in his pain
before he's picked up. Now, if you've got morphia, you can make the pain
bearable and keep quiet."
"Yes," I said quite brightly. But I felt curiously sick at heart.
"Do you still feel you would rather I did not come to Victoria to see
you off to-morrow?" I asked him when we said good-night.
"Yes. I don't feel I could stand it. You know, I've always been like
that. I've never wanted people who really mattered to see me off at a
station. Other people don't count. They can come in crowds. But not you.
It'll be hard enough to go, anyhow."
"Very well, then, we'll have lunch at Almond's, with that dear Russian
friend I want to show you off to, and then you can do the rest of your
shopping while I go and keep a business appointment in Farringdon
Street. I shall be back here to say good-bye to you at four o'clock."
But the business appointment next day in Farringdon Street kept me
longer than I had expected it would do and when I came out I could not
get a taxicab easily. Agitated, desperate, I had almost run well on to
the Embankment before I picked one up and then I dashed up to the hotel
steps to find the boy jumping in and out of his own cab with a harassed
look on his face.
"If I stay another minute I shall be too late," he said.
There was no time for me to explain. One moment's clasp of hands--one
quick, yet clinging, kiss--and he was gone!
Gone from me again--back to fight in France!
I stood looking straight before me with an odd feeling as if I were
turning to stone. Why had I not thought of getting into the cab and
driving to Victoria with him, without going on to the platform?
What a miserable good-bye I had had--I, who should have had the
tenderest!
Yesterday morning, when we had left home, his good-bye to his sister and
to the naval cadet had been sweet. He had leaned out of the railway
carriage window looking with misty eyes at his father still standing on
the platform of the East Coast town station, and had said to Vera and to
me:
"Dear father! I haven't been half good enough to him."
And I--I had had to part from him, through no fault of his or mine, as
if we were going to meet again in a few hours!
It is strange how vividly all these pictures of his whole past life
have flashed across my mind again as I have been sitting here waiting
for him!
It is four months since he went away that day after only that quick,
unsatisfying kiss.
"I will take care to have a better good-bye when this second leave is
over," I told myself aloud. "Only six days, including the travelling!
But I don't suppose they can spare the officers for any longer."
He is certainly very late. It is beginning to look as if he will not
come till to-morrow morning. The weather may be bad in the Channel.
Anyhow, we shall have to go on with dinner.
I hear a noise of the opening and shutting of doors.
I start to my feet.
This is he! This must be he!
But two or three moments pass and he does not come into the room. And
something new and strange and heavy has come into the air of the house;
or so, at least, I fancy.
My husband comes along. There is something very odd about his step. And
his face looks changed, somehow; sharpened in feature and greyish white.
"How true it is that electric light sometimes makes people look a
dreadful colour!" I think as he comes nearer to me.
I ran forward then to meet him.
"Where is Roland? Isn't he here? I thought I heard him come."
And then for the first time I noticed that the boy's father had a bit of
pinkish paper crushed up in his hand.
"Is that a telegram?" I cried eagerly, putting out my own hand. "Oh,
give it to me! What does it say? Isn't he coming to-night?"
One of my husband's arms was put quietly around me.
"No. It's no good our waiting for him any longer. He'll never come any
more. He's dead. He was badly wounded on Wednesday at midnight, and he
died on Thursday."
For minutes that were like years the world became to me a shapeless
horror of greyness in which there was no beginning and no end, no light
and no sound. I did not know anything except that I had to put out my
hand and catch at something, with an animal instinct to steady myself so
that I might not fall. And then, through the rolling, blinding waves of
mist, there came to me suddenly the old childish cry:
"Come and see me in bed, mother!"
And I heard myself answering aloud:
"Yes, boy of my heart, I will come. As soon as the war is over I will
come and see you in bed--in your bed under French grass. And I will say
good-night to you--there--kneeling by your side--as I've always done."
"Good-night!
Though Life and all take flight,
Never Good-bye!"
THE END
PRINTED BY
WM. BRENDON AND SON, LTD,
PLYMOUTH, ENGLAND
End of Project Gutenberg's Boy of My Heart, by Marie Connor Leighton