"Only a turn of head,A good-bye lightly said,And you set out to treadYour manlier road.But our youth's paths once met,And think not we forgetHow great a brother's debtTo you is owed.Sweep onward! and though fameShall aureole your name,Remember whence you cameIn boyhood's days.And in Life's wider yearsLook back on hopes and fears,Sweetened with Memory's tears,And blame and praise."
"Only a turn of head,A good-bye lightly said,And you set out to treadYour manlier road.But our youth's paths once met,And think not we forgetHow great a brother's debtTo you is owed.Sweep onward! and though fameShall aureole your name,Remember whence you cameIn boyhood's days.And in Life's wider yearsLook back on hopes and fears,Sweetened with Memory's tears,And blame and praise."
"Only a turn of head,A good-bye lightly said,And you set out to treadYour manlier road.
"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 forgetHow great a brother's debtTo you is owed.
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 fameShall aureole your name,Remember whence you cameIn boyhood's days.
Sweep onward! and though fame
Shall aureole your name,
Remember whence you came
In boyhood's days.
And in Life's wider yearsLook back on hopes and fears,Sweetened with Memory's tears,And blame and praise."
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 saidMy 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——"
"I shall remember miraculous things you saidMy 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——"
"I shall remember miraculous things you saidMy 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——"
"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 fondof 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 tobed, 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 onand 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 wasirate 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, oneknows 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 inhis 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 sorryI 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 hishands 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 usedfor 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 anotherfor 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 marchingover 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."
"There's a sob on the sea,And the Old Year is dying:Borne on night-wings to meThere's a sob on the sea.And for what could not beThe deep world's heart is sighing.There's a sob on the sea,And the Old Year is dying."Little Yeogh Wough.
"There's a sob on the sea,And the Old Year is dying:Borne on night-wings to meThere's a sob on the sea.And for what could not beThe deep world's heart is sighing.There's a sob on the sea,And the Old Year is dying."Little Yeogh Wough.
"There's a sob on the sea,And the Old Year is dying:Borne on night-wings to meThere's a sob on the sea.And for what could not beThe deep world's heart is sighing.There's a sob on the sea,And the Old Year is dying."
"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.
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?"
"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 thegramophone 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 firstlines 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 thingTo remember for years ...To remember with tears!"
"Four ducks on a pond,A grass-bank beyond,A blue sky of spring,White clouds on the wing:What a little thingTo remember for years ...To remember with tears!"
"Four ducks on a pond,A grass-bank beyond,A blue sky of spring,White clouds on the wing:What a little thingTo remember for years ...To remember with tears!"
"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. Butnow 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 amessenger. 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 mindsbeing 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 othersubalterns 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 howIthink 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'veunlearned 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: