"Jolly, oh, jolly at eve...."
"Jolly, oh, jolly at eve...."
"Jolly, oh, jolly at eve...."
"Jolly, oh, jolly at eve...."
A sob rose up within me and it was only with difficulty that I forced it back.
"What's the matter, Big Yeogh Wough?" whispered the boy beside me.
"It's that song. It's a lovely school song, but it's the saddest thing I've ever heard in my life. It seems to me that I can see generation after generation of boys rising and passing along—passing along to doom."
Under cover of the music Little Yeogh Wough spoke in a whisper again:
"It's a grand doom, anyhow—if you mean dyingfor one's country. Don't you think it's better to have your name on the walls of that chapel as having died fighting than to live a long, smooth life at home?"
"Yes, of course it is." I pulled myself together and spoke the truth as I knew it. "They've got the best of it, all right—those boys who died. But still—it's doom."
"No! No! It's glory."
The boy used to say that the only hard thing for him in his life at the big Public School was the doing without my half-hours by his bedside at night.
We were never quite so completely in touch with each other when we did not get these talks.
This may seem a strange thing to say, but it is the truth.
It is astonishing how much sympathy the right of entrance into another's sleeping-room means. It is all very well for people like George Bernard Shaw to declare that the custom of married persons sleeping together is an outrageous one and interferes with the liberty of the individual, but if in days to come people of his sort get their way there will be far fewer happy marriages. In the sitting-rooms of the home, as well as in the outside world, there are always things happening and influences at work that interfere with the smooth flowing of the magical current of love andsweetness between husband and wife; and if there is no privacy of the same bedroom to put this disturbance right every evening, what is to become of their happiness?
Some people seem to think that between a husband and a wife, or a mother and son, tenderness and devotion are a matter of course. But this is not so.
Nothing is got in this world without trouble. You cannot get a plant to thrive in your window unless you give it attention and show it plainly that you want it to thrive. Then do you suppose people are going to love you tenderly unless you cultivate that love as if it were a tomato in a greenhouse?
Not a bit of it; not even if you are the most perfect man or woman in the world.
I have an aunt who is devoted to me when we occupy the same bedroom, as we did nearly all through my childhood, but thinks me a hateful person when we only see each other casually. And I used to think of her when, owing to Little Yeogh Wough's absence at school, my nightly visits to his room to see him in bed, as he called it, were interrupted for long weeks at a time.
I knew that these breaks in our sacred and sweet night talks would have been dangerous if our love had been less strong. For in both of us, just as the electric current is tremendously strong when it flows, so it is entirely cut off and dead if anythinginterferes with it at all. When I am not burning hot with people that I love I am usually icily cold, even to the point of wondering whether I really love them at all. I have no dribblings of mild affection. So, knowing that Little Yeogh Wough had this same peculiarity, I used to be afraid when he had been away from me for a whole term.
But I need not have been afraid.
I have come to know since that there are loves which are strong enough to stand any test. And the love between him and me is one of these. Yet he had so much worship when he came home for his holidays that he ought to have been able to do without mine.
His father quickened up. The children quickened up. Miss Torry quickened up. The servants quickened up. The very dogs understood and showed a new energy.
But he got a good deal of blame, too, when Old Nurse came to deal with his things.
"Now I just asks you, mum, if you thinks as these 'ere myganas are the sort of thing that a schoolboy ought to get for hisself," said she indignantly. "'E've never got a thought except for getting what 'e wants and when 'e wants it, cost what it may. And you that devoted to 'im as you sits up till past two o'clock every morning a thinkin' about 'im and a writin' of 'im letters as would cover miles, as m'say!"
She was holding out the most bewitching suit of pyjamas that I have ever seen in my life: cream-coloured ones, soft and delicate, with cherry-coloured turned-out collar and cuffs and frogs. Really, I quite coveted the jacket to wear as a coat over a cream linen skirt.
"And there's another one in light and dark blue, just as bad," went on the worthy old creature confronting me, more indignant still. "I calls it disgraceful extravagance. I can't think what they've got such things in boys' shops for. Myganas made of sacking would be good enough for any boy living while he was in his teens, even if he was the Prince of Wales. And his socks! 'E've got dozens of pairs more than he took away with 'im—mauve and blue and green and all with clogs."
"Clogs?"
"Yes." Then, seeing that my face still looked blank, she lifted her own short white piqué skirt and exhibited one of her sturdy pillar-box legs, while she pointed to the clock up the side of her black stocking.
"Oh, clocks? Oh, I see! Oh, well, Nurse, never mind! There are so many worse things he might do than go in for a few extravagances."
"Extravagances! 'E've got no more idea of money than that there dog have."
She nodded towards the black Skye terrier. And I laughed to myself as I thought how truehad been an opinion passed on him by his sharp little sister when she had said, a few days earlier:
"If I had to depend on either of my brothers, I would rather it were Evelyn. He would only take a very tiny cottage for me to live in, but he would pay for it always; whereas Roland would find me a palace, saying nothing else was good enough for me, and then would forget to give me any money to keep it up."
That was Little Yeogh Wough all over.
We did not always talk at the times when I went in to see him in bed. Sometimes we stayed quite quiet all the time that I was there, having only our hands clasped. Sometimes we sang songs together, English and French, very softly, so that people passing on the landing outside might not think us lunatics. He, who was often so shy with others, was as free from self-consciousness with me as if he had been alone. I had taught him to be so, ever since he was two years old. The wonderful chord of love and sympathy between us was so strong that in these precious half-hours at the end of the day he could not feel any constraint with me, but only a double freedom.
Once we were even so childish as to try who could do the better cat-calling. But whether we talked or sang or cat-called, we got to love each other more with every moment that we passed there in thedarkness, he in the bed with his big lion-cub head on the pillow and I kneeling beside it, with my face close to his.
Whenever he came back from school it was with honours. He was learning, growing, developing in every way. He was learning to govern himself and through this to govern others. And to this end, and this end only, he had become a good cricketer and footballer.
"You see, Big Yeogh Wough, I had to do it," he explained. "Boys at a public school don't respect brains unless the boy that's got the brains is good at games. That's why a letter was written to you asking you to encourage me to put my heart in cricket and football."
"Well, I did encourage you," I laughed. "For, though I can't endure the man who's a cricketer or football player and nothing more, yet, on the other hand, I don't like the man who can't play games at all. There's always something wrong about him, as there is about a man who never smokes. Cricket and football are manure for the character just as Greek and Latin are manure for the mind. Only one doesn't want all manure and nothing else."
When I went away from him and left him to go to sleep I always felt as if a piece of living radium had had its activities turned off for a few hours. And then, night after night, my superstition would get hold of me and my strong belief in thelaw of Compensation would make me ask myself the question over and over again:
"Am I paying enough to Providence for the joy of having him? Am I suffering enough to deserve him? If not, where is the payment to come in? Because it's got to come in somewhere. He's so much more alive than most other people. Will anything happen to him? Will he be taken away from me?"
Only once in all his life has Little Yeogh Wough's love ever seemed to fail me, and that was at just about the time when his Public School career was coming to a close.
I had done a thing that I hardly ever do. I had defied one of my superstitions. And I had been punished for doing it.
My husband had asked me to let him paint my portrait. He had been asking me the same thing for years past, and I had always refused, remembering the injunction that: "Thou shalt not make to thyself the likeness of anything that is in the heavens above or the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth."
Of course I know there are sophistical people who make a point of mixing this commandment up with the sentence that follows it and pretending that it's only the bowing down and worshipping that are forbidden. But I know better. I have seen times without number the fate that has followed the person who, not being a royal personage or an actor or an actress, or a Lord Mayor, hasindulged in the arrogant joy of having his portrait painted.
These exceptions that I have made are safe enough, because it is, as it were, a part of their business in life to have their portraits painted, as well as their photographs taken.
"It is really such an absurd idea of yours," my husband said to me. "It's all the purest nonsense. Of course a lot of people die directly they have had their portraits painted, but that's mainly because they're usually getting on for a hundred before they can afford to pay anybody to do them."
"There may certainly be something in that," I agreed. "And I will admit this much—that I don't think this superstition applies completely to people who don't believe in it. But unluckily I do believe in it. Still, your not being a professional artist may make a difference. If you'll promise to do the thing very badly, so that fate may not know it's meant for me, I'll let you do it."
I don't think there was any particular reason why fate should have known that the picture was meant for me. Indeed, one of our friends, a well-known novelist, cried out directly he caught sight of the first sketch and before he knew whom it was meant to be, that it was the best portrait he'd ever seen of his dear and lifelong companion the late Henry Irving. Anyhow, as the painting progressed, I did what was for me an extraordinary thing—I caughtinfluenza. And, as the picture grew and grew, I got worse and worse, until I very nearly died of œdema of the lungs.
Little Yeogh Wough was written to and told all about it. His reply was a telegram to his father in the following words:
"Pray convey my deepest sympathy.—Roland."
"Pray convey my deepest sympathy.—Roland!"
He has never forgotten that telegram from that day to this. He has prayed to forget it, and has never been able to.
It did me more good than twenty doctors could have done. I sat up in bed and threw a dressing-gown round my shoulders and surveyed the blank faces of the other occupants of the room.
"Well, Miss Torry, I should like to know what you think of that?"
"What I think?" answered Miss Torry, shaking her head hopelessly. "What I think is—well, he must be mad."
"I'll tell you whatIthink," ventured Old Nurse, not looking at me but hurling her words like bombs at my secretary. "And that is that he've forgot for once to play his part and 'e's showing the selfishness that's all through and through him. When you come to think of all that his mother have done for 'im—and 'ow she've made a god of him and knelt down and worshipped'im, as m'say, and put everything and everybody else to one side for 'im—well, if I was 'er I'd never take the trouble to turn my head to look at him again. No, that I wouldn't. I'm only glad as she can see him in 'is true light at last."
"That telegram is like a message from a Mayor and Corporation to condole with royalty on the death of a distant cousin," I said bitterly. "Miss Torry, will you go downstairs and tell them to get me a mutton chop and to send it up as soon as possible? I see it doesn't pay me to be ill. I'm going to get well, portrait or no portrait, and stand up against that boy."
"I don't really think he can know how very ill you've been," said Miss Torry gently. "If he does know, I'm ashamed of him for a heartless wretch. But, you must remember, he's not accustomed to your ever having anything the matter with you and he may think the news sent him was exaggerated. But, anyhow, I'm cancelling the order I was sending to the Stores for him. He shall have no cake, no biscuits and no meat tabloids—and I only hope he's got no pocket money to get them on the spot for himself."
After this, for the first time since he had been born, I fought against my great and too-forgiving love for him and tried to cast it down. And when he came home for the holidays and on the first evening said to me, as always:
"Come and see me in bed, mother."
I answered him very coldly:
"No."
There is no anger in the world like the anger of a great love that is hurt.
I saw a shadow come into his deep and very sad eyes.
"I shan't be able to sleep unless you come and see me in bed," he said, with something very like a break in his voice.
I did not speak. I felt as if I were choking. He slid one hand to a bowl of flowers, took a piece of pink hyacinth and held it out to me.
"Come—and wear that."
Still I did not answer. Then a knock came at the door and Old Nurse walked into the room.
"If you please, 'm, when I asked you if I might go out for two hours this afternoon, it was so as I might go and see the doctor. I 'aven't been feeling at all well lately. So I went and 'e kept me an hour in 'is insulting-room, making an examination. An' 'e says I must leave here and go into 'ospital and 'ave an operation."
The Boy and I looked at each other with laughter in our eyes, in spite of the gravity of her announcement. It was her phrase "insulting-room" that had done it.
He knew now that I should come and see him in bed. And his glad, rich voice rang out with a gladder, richer tone than ever as he called to his father from the other side of a locked door:
"Father, can I have a bath?"
"I don't think as you'll 'ave much chance of one this evening, Master Roland, unless you wants a cold one," broke in Old Nurse, speaking from the nursery. "Your father 'ave put his visiting-card on the 'ot-water tap and I can't venture to take a drop of the 'ot, not even for the children."
"It will be all right, Roland," I said, running upstairs and proceeding to smooth matters for him.
For a long while that evening I knelt by his bed without either of us saying a word. Then at last he spoke:
"It won't matter much what things go wrong with me in life if only I can always have you to say good night to me."
"You might easily never have had me to say good night to you again, Little Yeogh Wough. I very nearly died about a month ago. You didn't believe it, of course, because I am so strong. But it was very cruel of you to send that telegram."
"I didn't send it. Another boy sent it. That doesn't make things any better, I know, but it happened that something went wrong at the house just then and I couldn't leave, and yet I wanted to send the telegram at once, and so I asked a boy who was going into the town to send it. He said he could remember it and didn't want it written out, and then he forgot it and put words of his own. There, now you know how it was."
"Why didn't you tell me this before, Little Yeogh Wough? It would have saved me so much suffering. You see, when a selfish woman, such as I've always been, loves unselfishly, it isn't a joy but a pain—one long aching pain all the time——"
I broke off and he patted my cheek with one of his hands that were now so big and strong.
"This doesn't look very promising for my going into the Indian Civil Service," he said, half playfully. "Oh, by the way, a week before I came away from school a fellow who had been studying up palmistry looked at my hands and told me I'm going to die a violent death by a bullet or the explosion of a shell. So that looks like India, doesn't it?"
"Yes. It looks like sedition. If you gave your life like that for your country, it would be terrible, but I should be proud. Oh, if only I could one day see you another John Nicholson!"
"I believe you'd rather have me another Nicholson or Rhodes than another Shakespeare."
"Yes, I would. I don't know why. I don't understand it myself. But I believe that every woman, even the brainiest, carries a man of Action hidden away somewhere within her. I can't help feeling that it's a greater thing to have given your name to Rhodesia than to have written 'Hamlet.' But what I love in you is that you've got the book brain and the other brain, too. You've learnt all that the University fogies knowwithout letting yourself become a fogy in doing it. Do you know, your classical master told somebody the other day that you were meteoric and that nobody could be compared with you? And he didn't know that the remark would ever be repeated to me."
"I don't like Latin and Greek a bit, really," he smiled. "I'm only good at them because I made up my mind that I would be. But I shouldn't like a life of mere bodily exercise only, like a soldier's. I don't know yet what I want. You know, Big Yeogh Wough, old proverbs are very silly. There's that one about a contented mind being a continual feast. It ought to be altered to 'A contented mind is a continual beast,' because nobody that's got one can ever do anything in the world, either for himself or anybody else. But, of course, the discontent must be good-tempered. I don't mean that silly people ought to say they won't sweep the roads because they're waiting to get up some day to the throne. But I think everybody ought to do a little striving after something higher."
After a few minutes I said:
"It will be a dreadful thing for me to have to say good-bye to you if you ever do go out to India, Little Yeogh Wough."
His arm stole round my neck. And as he held me like this I found myself saying over, half to him and half to myself, some lines that I had taught him long before from the 'Children's Song':
"'Land of our Birth, we pledge to theeOur love and toil in the years to be;When we are grown and take our place,As men and women with our race.Father in Heaven who lovest all,Oh, help Thy children when they call!Teach us to bear the yoke in youth,With steadfastness and careful truth;That, in our time, Thy Grace may giveThe Truth whereby the Nations live.Teach us to rule ourselves alway,Controlled and cleanly night and day;That we may bring, if need arise,No maimed and worthless sacrifice.'
"'Land of our Birth, we pledge to theeOur love and toil in the years to be;When we are grown and take our place,As men and women with our race.Father in Heaven who lovest all,Oh, help Thy children when they call!Teach us to bear the yoke in youth,With steadfastness and careful truth;That, in our time, Thy Grace may giveThe Truth whereby the Nations live.Teach us to rule ourselves alway,Controlled and cleanly night and day;That we may bring, if need arise,No maimed and worthless sacrifice.'
"'Land of our Birth, we pledge to theeOur love and toil in the years to be;When we are grown and take our place,As men and women with our race.
"'Land of our Birth, we pledge to thee
Our love and toil in the years to be;
When we are grown and take our place,
As men and women with our race.
Father in Heaven who lovest all,Oh, help Thy children when they call!
Father in Heaven who lovest all,
Oh, help Thy children when they call!
Teach us to bear the yoke in youth,With steadfastness and careful truth;That, in our time, Thy Grace may giveThe Truth whereby the Nations live.
Teach us to bear the yoke in youth,
With steadfastness and careful truth;
That, in our time, Thy Grace may give
The Truth whereby the Nations live.
Teach us to rule ourselves alway,Controlled and cleanly night and day;That we may bring, if need arise,No maimed and worthless sacrifice.'
Teach us to rule ourselves alway,
Controlled and cleanly night and day;
That we may bring, if need arise,
No maimed and worthless sacrifice.'
"Good night, boy of my heart!"
"Good night, Big Yeogh Wough."
At his room door I looked back to say lightly:
"Anyhow, even if there is any truth in your friend's prophecy, I daresay I shall be dead and buried before that bullet or that shell hits you in India."
"Oh, it's not to happen till I'm sixty! So, you see, whatever I may do, I shall be quite safe till then."
"Dew on the pink-flushed petals;Roseate wings unfurled:What can, I thought, be fairerIn all the world?Steps that were fain, but faltered,(What could she else have done?)Passed from the arbour's shadowInto the sun.Noon and a scented glory,Golden and pink and red:What, after all, are rosesTo me? I said."Little Yeogh Wough.
"Dew on the pink-flushed petals;Roseate wings unfurled:What can, I thought, be fairerIn all the world?Steps that were fain, but faltered,(What could she else have done?)Passed from the arbour's shadowInto the sun.Noon and a scented glory,Golden and pink and red:What, after all, are rosesTo me? I said."Little Yeogh Wough.
"Dew on the pink-flushed petals;Roseate wings unfurled:What can, I thought, be fairerIn all the world?
"Dew on the pink-flushed petals;
Roseate wings unfurled:
What can, I thought, be fairer
In all the world?
Steps that were fain, but faltered,(What could she else have done?)Passed from the arbour's shadowInto the sun.
Steps that were fain, but faltered,
(What could she else have done?)
Passed from the arbour's shadow
Into the sun.
Noon and a scented glory,Golden and pink and red:What, after all, are rosesTo me? I said."Little Yeogh Wough.
Noon and a scented glory,
Golden and pink and red:
What, after all, are roses
To me? I said."
Little Yeogh Wough.
He was at Aldershot with the Officers' Training Corps of his school on that Fourth of August on which the world looked in the face of the fact that Great Britain had declared war against Germany.
One never knows one has been living through happy days until they have gone. Then, looking back, one sees that the way of life that one had thought quite grey and ordinary was all aglow with heavenly light.
A good many things had happened since the night when the Boy and I had patched up the little trouble between us over his telegram. And one of these things was that he had finished his last term at his school in a blaze of honours.
He had been, perhaps, rather too brilliant a meteor there, so that the sky was likely to seem grey after he had vanished from it. He had won a scholarship for a great Oxford college, and he looked into a future so gloriously golden that he himself had almost turned his eyes from it, dazzled and half afraid.
Some months before this he had brought home once on a week's visit one of his two best friends, a very tall and straight and serious boy called Edward Brennan. My first ideas of Edward were that he did not greatly care for womankind and that, considering that he was so young, he had an astonishing worship of the music of Beethoven.
"I can't understand it," I had said to him once. "Oh, of course I recognise that Beethoven is very great, and all that, and I like his music about twice a year when I feel ecclesiastical; but on the whole he always strikes me as a composer who was born an old man and who made music for old men."
"Why, mother always worships old men!" put in Little Yeogh Wough mischievously.
"Yes, but not as musical composers," I retorted. "You see, I've got a mind that always has what you may call the apple-blossom feeling in it, andanything fusty always repels me. I would run miles bare-foot to avoid seeing Stonehenge or any ruins. It's good that those things should be in the world in order to give the dry-as-dust people something to do to write about them; but in general I agree with Emerson that it's not the business of the rose that blooms to-day to worry itself into wrinkles about the roses that bloomed even yesterday—much less two thousand years ago."
And then the rather cold Edward had quite warmed up and had done a thing that I liked. He had actually had the boldness to hold back my arm when I was putting a modern French serenade record on the gramophone, and insist on substituting for it a part of "Leonora."
"All right, Edward. I'll make a bargain with you. If you'll try to talk French a little every day and to read George Meredith, I'll try to like Beethoven."
But the most important fact about Edward, so far as I personally was concerned, was one which I did not take properly into account till afterwards. And that was the fact that he had a sister.
I had heard that he had one, of course. I knew that already, before Roland went to Edward's people on a visit. But then—so many boys have sisters!
My first suspicions had been aroused when the Boy had come back, and began writing letters.
It seems a funny thing to say, but I can alwaystell what is in people's minds when I see them write letters.
To begin with, I never feel quite comfortable when people are writing letters in the same room with me. Of course, this is really laughably childish and quite unjustifiable, but I am not by any means the only person who has the feeling. There are some people who have to get up and go out of rooms where their relatives are writing letters, lest they should deal them mortal blows over the head.
This doesn't apply to offices, of course, or to people who write business letters. I myself feel quite unperturbed when a business letter is getting written; and I always know that it's a business letter, though a guest in our house may be writing it at the opposite end of the room to where I am sitting. There is something in the air of the writer which seems to say: "I'm only writing this because I've got to. I wouldn't do it else."
But when a lot of ordinary persons sit down to write futile screeds that are not wanted, to other ordinary people who, in nine cases out of ten, couldn't tell you if they tried how the postal system is worked, they do it with an air of defiant importance which says as plainly as possible:
"Of course, you thinkyou'rethe only person in the world whose correspondence matters. But you're quite mistaken. We have friends, too—most valuable friends—who absolutely insist ongetting letters from us as frequently as possible. Miss Violet Smithers wrote to me yesterday—we were at a boarding-school together in Lower Norwood for three years—and I must answer her to-day. I can't help it if you want the only stamp in the house for a legal document which will become invalid if not sent to-day, and every post office within ten miles is shut under some new closing regulation. Miss Violet Smithers must have her letter."
I knew an old gentleman once who went absolutely off his head because of the immense volume of his servants' correspondence. He danced with fury on his gouty feet when he met his domestics "just going to the post, sir," and in the end he announced to me his intention of retiring to a cottage where only one servant would be necessary and he was going to advertise for her, offering fancy wages if she answered the following description:
"Orphan who has lost both parents; absolutely friendless; no sweetheart and totally unable either to read or to write."
I never knew whether he found his treasure or not.
After which, I will go back to Little Yeogh Wough and to the fact that when I saw him spending two or three hours sitting quite still at a table with his fine shoulders and his lion-cub head bent over a lengthy epistle, I began to think that there must be something a little wrong somewhere.
And when he followed this up by spending an entire morning, from breakfast to luncheon, making up one small parcel, my doubts became certainties.
"Is that parcel intended for the King or Queen, Roland?" I asked him when he had finished and had carefully conveyed the package away to his own room, in order, I guessed, that nobody might see the address on it.
He looked at me and laughed.
"What do you mean, Big Yeogh Wough?"
"Why, you've sent out for some new brown paper because all the pieces in 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 muchdisappointed. 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 anAfrican 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 haveto 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 doctorthere 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 notdismay 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 todo 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, andwith 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: