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 Another Random Document on
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Newbolt and Conan Doyle and Quiller Couch. The one he came to
love best was Newbolt's "Vitæ Lampada" with those lines:—

"The sand of the desert is sodden red,

Red with the wreck of a square that broke;
The Gatling's jammed and the Colonel's dead,
And the regiment's blind with dust and smoke;
The river of death has brimmed its banks,
And England's far and honour's a name;
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
'Play up! Play up! And play the game'!"

"Do you understand this, Little Yeogh Wough? You are not likely ever
to be a soldier, but you have got to carry all this out in ordinary life,
as much as in war."

"This is the word that, year by year,

While in her place the School is set,
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dares forget;
This they all, with a joyful mind,
Bear through life like a torch in flame;
And, falling, fling to the hosts behind:
'Play up! Play up! And play the game!'"

Oh, yes! Yes! I was making him a soldier with every day and night
that passed. But I did not know it. Ah! If I could have looked
forward and seen myself as I am to-night, sitting here waiting for
him to come home from the trenches on his second leave!
"You don't want me to be a real soldier when I grow up, do you,
mother?" he asked me.
"Well, no, dear, I don't think I do. I don't think it will be enough for
you to occupy all your mind with. You see, soldiering is an
ornamental affair with us. It isn't as if we made a thorough business
of it, as the Germans do—though, when I had the good luck the
other evening to meet the biggest military man of to-day and have a
talk with him, he said it was one of our worst mistakes to think that
no brains are wanted in the Army. He said we want all the best
brains we can get, and the more of them the better."
Sometimes, when I left the boy, after tucking him in and pulling back
his curtains and opening his window, I met the sturdy Old Nurse,
who had been lying in wait for me.
"If you please'm, I wish you'd speak to that there Master Roland and
make 'im behave 'isself better. I can't think how you thinks he's such
a good boy and so reasonable. Why, the way he do carry on in the
nursery is something shocking. He hid his myganas to-night till I was
a hour and more 'unting for them and 'ad to air 'im a clean suit of
them to go to bed in. You spoils 'im so that there's no doin' nothin'
with 'im when your back's turned."
She was indignantly holding out a suit of pyjamas. I did my best to
look stern.
"You know very well, Nurse, that I always punish him when he
deserves punishment. I gave him a touch of the cane only last
week."
She made her long upper lip look longer.
"'M, yes. M'say, there's punishing and punishing. There's some ways
of caning that's more like petting than anything else. Why, now,
didn't you tell me that those two young gentlemen as was dining
here the other night wasn't very well? That's Master Roland's doings.
They 'ad that bottle of still 'Ock as 'ad been uncorked and corked up
again, and Master Roland, 'e thought as it ought to be sparkling
'Ock, and he took and emptied all the Pyretic Saline into it—a new
full bottle. What I d'say is, if you spoils a child——"
I left the good Gloucestershire woman to go on with her mumblings
unheeded. But now, remembering how she always accused me of
spoiling him, I asked myself if I really did so.
Did I really spoil him? If so, it was only a little, and I am glad—glad
—glad—knowing as I do what he has had to bear since he went out
to the trenches.
He, who had been so shielded, has learned during this past year
what it is like to have the brains of a man you knew and cared for
spattered all over you as you stand in your trench. He has learned
what it feels like to slip and fall on something soft and slime-like on
his way to a new trench at night and then to find that he had slid his
hand into the decaying body of a long-dead German soldier. He has
heard wild screams of women at night from the depths of a wood,
and weeks afterwards has come upon murdered nuns lying cold and
piteous, seven of them together. When I think of all this I thank God
that he has at least a happy childhood to look back upon.
He says in his last letter that he has learnt much and gained much
and grown up suddenly and got to know the ways of the world. This
has made me curiously uneasy. I have a fear that it may cover up
something—some experience that I should not have liked him to go
through. And yet—while he can still sign himself Little Yeogh Wough,
I know that he is not lost nor utterly spoiled. I know that in spite of
the new life and its duties and horrors, there is even yet a good deal
of the old life left in him. He is still the "old Roland"; still mine—the
boy of my heart.
 CHAPTER IV
THE BOY'S TREASURES AND OTHER THINGS

I went to look at his room, feeling that it ought to be done up before

he comes home.
It would certainly be improved by new wallpaper, but I dare not
have this improvement made. Superstition reminds me that I have
often noticed how unlucky people have been who have had their
bedrooms done up. They are always either ill in the rooms or else
never occupy them any more. I decided at once that I would not
have it done. The room was attractive enough, as it is, with its high,
narrow, mirror-hung door leading into the bathroom, and its vast
wardrobe packed full now with his ordinary clothes, his military
great-coat—too long and cumbersome for the trenches, even in
winter—and piles of small books which in the past two years he has
bought out of his own pocket-money; and his sword.
The bed had an air as if it were waiting for him. The darling boy!
How thankfully he nestled down between the sheets when he came
home the first time! His big brown eyes were almost wild, that night.
He had the look of a man who has been back for a time into savage
life and wonders at the most everyday things of civilisation.
"I haven't slept in a proper bed since I first went out," he said.
"Why, what about that French château where you said everything
was so luxurious?" I asked him.
"Oh, everything is comparative!" He laughed. "I had a feather bed
on the floor there and it seemed to be almost a wicked luxury even
though there were no sheets or pillows and I had only my brown
blanket over me."
Yes, even then, a fortnight ago, his bed had an air of expectancy
about it, as if it knew that he had written to say he was coming
again. Above the head of it the wall was bare, because I had left it
to him to decide what should be put there, and he never cared two
straws what his room looked like as long as it had all the little things
he wanted in it and was within a dozen yards of a bathroom.
That unlucky bathroom! Why is it that bathrooms and staircases
cause more angry passions in a household than anything else?
I, for example, am not a bad-tempered woman. I am positive that
even my worst enemy—my worst feminine enemy—would think
twice before laying ill-temper to my charge; yet when anybody
meets me on the stairs, or comes upstairs close behind me, I feel
inhuman. I quite understand the mood of the late editor of one of
the great daily newspapers, who drove from his house without
notice any servant unlucky enough to meet him on the stairs. So,
too, when a new London club was started a few years ago in a very
tall and narrow house, I said it could never succeed, because all the
people—members and servants alike—were always mounting and
descending the staircases, like Burne Jones's figures on the Golden
Stairs. And it did not succeed.
In the same way, most men cannot bear that the door of any room,
even the most private, in their own home should be locked against
them. And this brings me back to the bathroom and Little Yeogh
Wough.
When a bathroom is of the ordinary kind, the only cause of trouble,
as a rule, is whether the hot water is hot enough. But this particular
bathroom has three doors, and the occupants of the three
contiguous rooms from which those doors give access occasionally
emerged at the same time and fiercely disputed possession of the
means of cleanliness.
When Little Yeogh Wough was at home he usually slipped in at a
well-chosen moment by his particular door and, locking the two
other doors on the inside, remained master of the situation, while
various other members of the family, and notably his father, stormed
outside. The boy had always been a fanatical devotee of the Bath,
and since he has been in the trenches and personal cleanliness has
been difficult, he has become more so than ever. He loves his room
because of this door leading into the bathroom, and more so still
because of the long mirror set in the door on his own side.
For he is vain, my Little Yeogh Wough. There is nothing effeminate
about him, though he knows a great deal of womanly lore and
could, for instance, choose the right lace for a particular gown as
well as I could do it myself. There is nothing of the tailor's or
hairdresser's dummy about him, with clothes looking like those
pictured in an illustrated booklet and hair plastered with the
meticulous exactitude required of men going into a Thames racing
craft, where one hair more on one side or the other might sink the
cranky shell and plunge them into the river. He is smart and polished
and speckless as any prince with a valet at five hundred a year, and
he brilliantined his rather fair and very rebellious locks until in the
process of subduing they became many shades darker than their
natural hue; yet he always saw clearly and maintained firmly that
clothes should set off the man or woman and not be allowed to
make use of the glorious human figure as a mere peg on which to
display themselves, while hair should never advertise the coiffeur.
So, though he has always examined himself before looking-glasses
and had pots of all sorts of toilet things on his dressing-table, yet he
has always been the manliest of the manly.
"Why shouldn't a boy look in the glass as well as a girl?" he said to
me one day. "I don't see why it should only be the females that are
allowed to take pleasure in whatever good things in the way of looks
may happen to have been given them."
All his little personal ways came back to me as I moved about his
room, making sure that nothing should be missing when he came.
The back brush he had bought for the bath looked a little dusty, so I
washed it. Even as I did this, snatches of poems which I would
rather not have remembered just then kept on coming to my mind
and my lips. There was a poem called "Aftermath" in The Times,
which I shall never be able to forget. It begins:

"Yes ... he is gone ... there is the message ... see!

My son ... my eldest son. So be it, God!
This is no time for tears ... no time to mourn.
In the years to come,
When we have done our work, and God's own peace
With tranquil glory floods a troubled world,
Why, then, perhaps, in the old hall at home,
Our eyes, my wife, shall meet and gleam, and mark,
Niched on the walls in sanctity of pride,
Hal's sword, Dick's medal, and the cross He won,
Yet never wore. That is the time for tears;
Drawn from a well of love deep down ... deep down;
Deep as the mystery of immortal souls.
That is the time for tears ... not now! Not now!"

And then the last line of some verses which I saw somewhere else,
headed "The Second Lieutenant":

"Up and up to his God,"

and, best and worst of all, Rupert Brooke's:

"If I should die, think only this of me,

That there's one corner of a foreign field
Shall be for ever England——"

When I got to this point, the tears which had been blinding me so
that I could hardly see what I was doing brimmed over and fell on
the back brush. Why did I let those tears come when I ought to
have been smiling and singing because he is coming home?
I might as well be foolish enough to cry now, when I am sitting here
waiting for him and when I know that at some blessed moment
during the next half-hour he is bound to come in.

I was quite angry with myself when I wiped my tears away that time
a fortnight ago. I dried the back brush with unnecessary energy and
then took another and closer look about his room.
One of his hats and his riding whip hung together on the wall above
shelves of books which he had bought himself. Every one of those
books spoke to me of him as I glanced at their titles. Another
bookcase was gloriously rich with his Public School prizes. Such
handsome, wonderful books they are; and there are about fifty of
them. What a tale they tell of power and effort! I had had a curtain
made for the bookcase, to keep the dust away from these most
precious of treasures, and as I drew the velvet folds back now and
looked at the massive ornamental volumes, I felt a thrill at the
thought that my continual spurring of him onward and upward had
not been in vain.
"And he has never disappointed me," I thought aloud.
No, he had never disappointed me. And people as a rule are so
disappointing! One's friends fall short, one's lover says the wrong
thing at the wrong time, or forgets to say the right thing—which is
even worse—and one's dearest clergymen and favourite actors and
heroes generally make unspeakable fools of themselves just as one
is getting ready to fall on one's knees and worship them.
All my life I have asked too much of people and then been left
gaping at their unsatisfyingness. So it was no wonder that I was
always frankly amazed whenever I stopped to realise that Little
Yeogh Wough had always come up to my expectations.
Not that he was ever a prig. Heaven forbid! I would run farther from
a prig than from a criminal. He has always had heaps of faults. But
they are fine faults. One never rams one's head against a blank wall
in him, but always finds deeps and deeps behind.
"That there Master Roland 'ave got so many nooks and corners in his
mind that you can't never tell when you've got to the end of 'im,"
Old Nurse said once, mixing up her words, but showing her meaning
plainly enough. "And what I says is, 'e'll go on getting deeper and
deeper all his life, till 'e gets into the sincere and yellow leaf, as the
Scriptures calls it."
Oh, how his room went on speaking to me of him! Sargent's picture
of Carmencita, the Spanish dancer, is over the fireplace, with two
fencing foils crossed above it; and above these again is a picture of
two stately lovers walking by the shore in Brittany. The table near
the foot of the bed had a pile of little military books upon it—"Quick
Training for War" and its fellows—and dear little books of poems,
and some sheets of his favourite green blotting-paper. He put
himself out a good deal to get that green blotting-paper, saying that
white showed the ink stains too much, while pink was an
abomination, like a red flannel petticoat for a woman or a magenta
pelisse for a pallid, blue-eyed child.
The dressing-table drawers were, and still are, full of things that he
has no use for at the Front; all except the two small drawers on
either side of the looking-glass, which have got a few old letters in
them and a few odds and ends of nice things, such as solidified Eau
de Cologne and the most deliciously fragrant shaving cream.
Shaving, indeed! Why, he has only done it for a year or so! I am
sorry, by the way, that he has got a moustache now. Speaking for
myself, I don't like a man with a moustache, except in the capacity
of lover. Of course, I hate beards, anyhow. They always make me
think of Abraham and Isaac and all those old uninteresting men
whom no woman with any romance in her would look at twice, even
if it were a case of him and of her being the sole survivors of the
human race in the world. By the way, though, I did once see a beard
which was attractive—or, more truthfully, was not unattractive. It
was a short, silky, auburn beard, torpedo-shaped, and it was on a
naval officer who was otherwise so charming that he might perhaps
have carried off worse things than this with success. But, coming
back to the moustache, it is a fit appendage for a man in the lover
stage, because it gives an impression of masculinity. But when a
man is my uncle or my father, or simply my friend, and above all,
when he is likely to argue much with me, I prefer him to be clean
shaven. It gives me a feeling of equality.
When I was a little girl I used to wonder why a man's words,
however silly, always seemed to have more importance than a
woman's words, however wise; and I satisfied myself that it was
because a man's statements nearly always came from under a
moustache. Even if he only said how fine the day was, the fact that
the remark came from a mouth that had a black or brown or golden
porch to it gave it a quite undue amount of weight. On the other
hand, when I talk with men whose faces are as hairless as my own,
I don't feel that they have any advantage over me. So, as I often
have long discussions with Little Yeogh Wough, I felt quite sorry
when he had to get a moustache.
Still, he is my Little Yeogh Wough, whose babyish and boyish
weaknesses I have known and loved so well.
As I looked more and more round the room, I got more reminders of
his small-boyish and babyish times. Under the bed, with several
pairs of handsome boots, there was the wreck of an old, squeaky
gramophone, and the yet more interesting wreck of a toy typewriter,
with which, at the age of eleven, he printed twelve numbers of a
monthly home magazine called "The Vallombrosa Record," all by
himself. A dusty golliwog and a Teddy bear are jammed in among
the ruins of these things, together with a few feathers from the tail
of an old life-size cock which used to stand on the night nursery
mantelpiece.
I opened the wardrobe. The first thing that my hand touched was a
tape-measure, in the shape of a negro's head, with the tape coming
out of the mouth. And how this thing brought back to me the Little
Yeogh Wough of six and a half years old!
One fine spring morning, my secretary, Miss Torry, had scurried into
my study in our London house with this thing in her hand and her
face severe.
"Really, you ought to begin training this boy's moral character," said
she, speaking with the freedom of one who, though employed by
me, was yet older than I. "You see this tape measure. He bought it
for a Christmas present for his grand-mamma because he wanted it
himself, and he felt quite sure she would give it back to him as soon
as she knew he wanted it; but she didn't, and now he's been up
there to Hampstead and wheedled it out of her. He's very selfish,
you know, and it ought to be nipped in the bud. And he's
extravagant with his selfishness—and so cunning, too! Look at the
way he came to you yesterday and asked you for a shilling—at his
age!—and went out and bought a miserable little peach for tenpence
and brought it to you with a great deal of fuss and hung round while
you ate it, so that he got you to give him quite nine-tenths of it, and
then told you all the evening that he'd made you a present of a
peach. Now this is a tendency that ought to be checked. Canon
Bloomfield of St. Margaret's says that——"
"It's all right, Miss Torry. The boy is not really cunning, though he
seems so. He has a dear little heart, and, in spite of his tricks, he
would give his brown velvet eyes right out of his head for me."
I put down the old negro head tape-measure and took up a dark
little overcoat dating from the time when he was seven. I had
brought it in here out of an old box, meaning to give it away. It was
badly cut, and so he had never worn it much; because, even at
seven years old, he had known when a coat had no style, and had
hated it. Certainly it used to make him—yes, even him—look almost
commonplace.
"Fancy the little wretch having known at seven years old whether a
thing made him look commonplace or not!" I thought with a laugh
as I moved the unsatisfactory garment aside.
He had known at that early age, too, whether my own clothes were
satisfactory or not. He had always taken a vivid, throbbing interest in
every new garment I had; yes, and in every new yard of ribbon and
in every spray of flowers.
"Perhaps it's a good thing he has met Vera and taken a fancy to her,
even though he is only a boy still," I said to myself aloud. "Such a
fellow as he is might so easily get into trouble with the wrong
woman—especially now that he's in khaki. There's so much dash
about him. I should fall in love with him myself in five minutes, if I
were not his mother."
Falling in love? How absurd it seems in connection with this boy
whom I had given to the world, and whose very early boyhood was
only such a little way back!
My cook has only been here eight years, and yet she remembers him
as quite a small boy. It makes me laugh to think of her amazement
when I mention that he has a great friendship for Vera.
"Friendship for a young lady, mum? What? Master Roland? Well, I
never did! What the boys is coming to in this war, I don't know. And
there's the newspapers all advising 'em to get married before they
go out. Mischievous nonsense, I call it. What's the good of getting
married to a man who may leave you a widow inside of a month?
Two or three girls I know have just done that, for the sake of getting
the men's money. Downright mean, I call it, and hard on the
taxpayers that have got to keep the soldiers' widows and orphans;
and so I told 'em. Of course, it's different for your sort; but it's not
right for the likes of us. It's not my idea of gettin' married, anyhow,
and so I told my young man when he was going out."
"But wouldn't you feel more sure of him, Joanna, if he'd married
you? You see, if he were your husband, and not only just your lover,
you'd know that you could trust him out there, and that he wouldn't
be flirting with French girls."
But Joanna laughed doubtfully.
"I don't see as that follows, mum. 'Usbands flirts just as much as
lovers, from what I've seen. And I'm not afraid of my young man
flirting, anyhow, because he isn't the sort. You see, he never calls
me darling in his letters, or anything like that. If he was to do that
kind of thing, then I should know that he was very likely carrying on
with other girls. But he only puts in a 'dear' now and then, and that's
the sort that you can trust."
Wise philosopher of the kitchen! If only all women would judge their
men as truthfully.
"But to think of Master Roland!" the cook began again.
Yes, to think of Little Yeogh Wough beginning to care for any girl!
As I went on rummaging in the wardrobe, I came across a little
loose pile of letters which he had sent back from the Front. I should
never dream in the ordinary way of reading anybody else's letters—I
carefully avoid looking into his private drawer in this same piece of
furniture—but it happens that he told me playfully that I could read
any of the letters in this particular little pile, if I chose.
The first two were from myself to him. Of course I might look at
those.
They bore signs of violent usage in the opening. I have a habit of
fastening down the flaps of my envelopes with stickphast, and then
making them still more secure by sitting on the letters in a book. So
Little Yeogh Wough had often told me that, whenever he saw a
letter of mine arriving, he sent his soldier servant for an entrenching
tool to open it with.
Not that he had any right to tease me on this matter. For he followed
the same plan himself in fastening letters. He always used stickphast
and he always sat on the missives in a book.
Whenever we bought a book that we did not enjoy, we took it to sit
on as a correspondence flattener.
"Don't you ever believe anybody who says they've opened by
mistake any letter that you'd written," Little Yeogh Wough said to me
once. "It's a sheer impossibility."
The letter from myself to him, which I had just taken up, was one
which he had marked to be put away later on in his despatch box for
permanent safe keeping. I recognise it as one that I had written at a
time when I knew he was in particular danger. Vera had made him
promise that when there was going to be a great "push," or when
any other circumstances arose which materially increased the
ordinary risk to his life, he would send her a certain short Latin
sentence. In an hour of crisis he had sent this sentence, and the
anxious girl, who thought of him all day and dreamed of him all
night, had passed on the warning to me.
A chill ran through my blood as I re-read my own written words:

"Monday, 27th Sept., 1915.

"My own sweet Little Yeogh Wough,—
"The news from the French front this morning filled us with joy.
For a moment I positively danced. All those thousands of
German prisoners meant so much! And then a horrible thought
came to me that it must mean worse danger for you; and now a
letter from Vera says that you have sent her a few words—of
which Big Yeogh Wough is perhaps a little jealous—to say that
the posts will be stopped very soon.
"This strikes me as very significant. It would have given me a
danger signal, even apart from that 'short Latin sentence' which
I hear you have also sent.
 "Dearest, your Big Yeogh Wough, who has always been so
proud of you ever since you have been born, is prouder of you
than ever now. She is glad you are where your duty of honour
and manhood demand that you should be. You are fighting, not
only for us and all that we glory in, but for those who have died
—and who are all your brothers, whether they were peers or
privates. I feel at this moment that I should like to go the round
of the whole army and kiss them every one—but keeping always
a special kiss for you.
"But this pride and this gladness don't prevent me from being
on the rack. I have been troubled for some days past; and I
should have written to you several times during this interval in
which I have been silent, if it were not that I have been much
more than usually occupied with the delicate steering of things
in general. But always my heart and my thoughts are with you,
my very precious boy. I only wish my love could be of use as a
talisman, to guard you against all the dangers.
"Your always devoted, in all lives through which we may pass,
"Big Yeogh Wough.
"Your cake will be sent off to you to-day. The Bystander has just
written to you."

Ah, thank God! He came safely through that time of extra-acute

peril. If he had not come through it—what sort of human wreck
should I be now?
I shivered as I put the letter down with fingers that were not quite
steady.
Then I took up another letter from the pile—a letter with a London
postmark and with a Hammersmith address for its heading.
"What a common-looking, sloppy handwriting!" I thought as I looked
at it.
And the thing began:
"You dear pigeon of a Roly."
And it was signed:
"Your duck of a Queenie."
And underneath the "Queenie" there were actually crosses for
kisses, as if the letter were from a tweenymaid!
I got a shock. Shivers went down my back. What vulgar creature
could this be who had dared to make so free with the purest-minded
and least vulgar boy in all the world? Who was she that had taken
advantage of him like this, just because he was at large and in
khaki?
 CHAPTER V
GOOD DAYS AND GOOD NIGHTS

I know exactly the kind of woman this is.

Even in my indignation, I could not help half-smiling as I
remembered certain angry complaints made by a fashionable mother
whom I had met at a War charity meeting.
"It really is a shame that you can't let your fresh-minded boy go out
into the world without his coming across snare-laying women," she
had burst out confidentially. "The poor silly fellows get quite led
astray by some of these girls that they meet where they're billeted—
shoddy girls with a cheap prettiness and cheap little openwork
stockings and flashy haircombs, and imitation jewellery, and no
minds or souls. You know the sort. They're always hankering after
small outings and excitements, and, of course, they would all like to
catch baby second lieutenants, who may one day be something in
the world."
She had been so much upset, this fashionable mother, that I knew
she must have suffered.
"What a pity that this 'Queenie' of Hammersmith doesn't know better
when she's wasting her time!" I thought. "Why couldn't she see that
her 'Roly' might love a woman a hundred times worse than she is,
but he wouldn't love her? Anyhow, he ought to have burnt her silly
letter. I will see that he burns it when he comes back. I will not have
such stuff defiling this consecrated room.... And yet—I wonder if it is
the same charm in him that makes both Queenie and me adore
him!"
For it was certainly not because he was my son that I was wrapped
up in him.
"Why ever do you think such a heap of me?" he had asked me more
than once. And I had always answered him:
"Because, my boy, you are that strangest and most wonderful thing
in all the world—an interesting young man. As a rule, the masculine
person isn't worth taking the least notice of till he's thirty—except for
athletics. I put that down in a diary once when I was a little girl and
I should put the same thing down now. It quite takes one's breath
away to find a boy who is athletic and fascinating at the same time.
One feels that a drum ought to be beaten through the town. Do you
know, you will even be one of the few persons whose weddings are
not dull. And weddings, as a rule, are the dullest things that ever
happen."
I had spoken so lightly and yet I had meant every word that I had
said.
No, I need not be afraid that any of the shoddy, mean-souled
women of this world will ever have much chance with a boy of his
sort. And if, indeed, he really and deeply loves Vera Brennan, the
dream-figure with the amethyst eyes, then she is very much to be
envied of other girls.
Was it for her that he had written the little poem which came to my
hand at this moment among the letters, and of which he had sent
one copy to her and one to me?
He had written it in Ploegsteert Wood soon after he had gone out to
the Front, and the lines were as sad and as sweet as the little dark
blue flowers that had made them well up out of his heart:
 "Violets from Plug Street Wood,
Sweet, I send you oversea.
(It is strange they should be blue,
Blue, when his soaked blood was red;
For they grew around his head.
It is strange they should be blue.)

Violets from Plug Street Wood—

Think what they have meant to me!
Life and Hope and Love and You.
(And you did not see them grow
Where his mangled body lay,
Hiding horror from the day.
Sweetest, it was better so.)

Violets from oversea,

To your dear, far, forgetting land;
These I send in memory,
Knowing You will understand."

"Your dear, far, forgetting land!"

Oh, the reproach in those words! And do we not, most of us,
deserve that reproach?
I took out his sword from the drawer in which I had wrapped it away
in silk, and I very nearly bowed myself before it in my passion of
reverence.
Strange! That one should regard as so sacred a thing that is meant
to kill!
Of all such things, it is only the sword that is held holy. Nobody
reverences a revolver, while a dagger is mean and sly and a rifle is
nothing in particular, like a gardening tool. But a sword is a glory and
a joy, and now, as I handled the sword of the boy of my heart, I
could have laughed for sheer delight in all the splendid things that it
stood for.
What a pity that it should have become a mere show thing, wanted
only on parade and never taken out to the Front!
As I stood holding the sword, my husband came into the room with
a newspaper in his hand. He is a man who can hardly ever be seen
without a newspaper in his hand. But this time his face showed that
something new and grave had happened.
"Gretton is dead," he announced to me. "He was killed by a shell at
Festubert five days ago."
I caught my breath sharply as my eyes met his.
"Gretton?" I exclaimed; and my voice sounded thin in my own ears.
"Yes." My husband nodded jerkily. "I don't really like telling you
about it, but this comes rather strangely on the top of ugly dreams
I've had lately. I dreamt four times last week that I saw Roland and
Gretton coming along arm in arm, laughing together, but looking
more like upright dead men than living flesh and blood. And the
queer thing about it was that, though they were laughing together,
Roland was trying to get away from Gretton, and somehow he
couldn't. It was as if something that was stronger than their own will
kept them close to each other. There was something horrible about
it."
I knew that the blood was leaving my cheeks and lips as I looked at
him. And yet this boy Gretton was a person whom I had never
spoken to in my life!
For the first time for nearly three months, I felt a deadly chill run
through me again, just as when Little Yeogh Wough had first gone
out to the Front.
"Do you know, I can't help feeling troubled about this?" I heard
myself saying in a strange whisper. "It is very silly of me, but I can't
help feeling that—that Gretton may be calling to him to follow."

It was not so mad a thing as it seemed, this fear that had just come
to me that the boy Gretton, killed five days ago, might be calling to
the boy of my heart.
Their lives had been linked together in a most curious way. They had
never had any particular liking for each other—indeed, it must have
been almost the other way about, for Little Yeogh Wough had never
brought him to us or gone to his home—and yet in their careers they
had been as brother spirits.
They had both opened their eyes on life in the same year and
month, and within a stone's throw of each other in London. They
had both been given the Christian name of Roland, spelt without a
"w."
They met by going to the same preparatory school, and from the
hour of this first meeting their lives had run side by side. They had
not run quite neck and neck, for Little Yeogh Wough was always
ahead. He got a seventy-pound scholarship for a certain great Public
School, when Gretton won a fifty-pound one.
It was the same with Oxford, for which they both gained classical
scholarships. Little Yeogh Wough was always well ahead. Yet, still,
they were always together.
When the war had come, they had got their commissions at the
same time. But Gretton had got out to the Front first.
"I shall get out soon now that Gretton's out there," Little Yeogh
Wough had said to me confidently.
And he had gone soon, and they had fought the Germans side by
side, as they had fought for honours at school. And now Gretton had
been killed, and my husband had dreamed that he saw him walking
with our Roland, arm linked in arm, holding on to him closely and
refusing to let him go.
"I am a fool to think anything of a dream," I told myself angrily,
trying to thrust away from me the grey spectre of Fear that had
risen up before me suddenly in the pale winter sunlight. "After all,
what is a dream? It's a thing that never comes to a person in perfect
health—except once in a way, when one happens to be awakened
about half an hour before one's proper time and then goes off into a
doze. And then, there is Little Yeogh Wough's lucky white lock. That
will keep him from being killed. He will get badly wounded, I dare
say, but not killed—no, certainly, not killed."
I have not mentioned the boy's lucky white lock of hair before. It
was a queer little white patch in among the gold, just over his left
ear.
It was Gretton who, when they went to school first, had called Little
Yeogh Wough a sixpenny-halfpenny Golliwog.
"That comes of doin' things by 'alves with Master Roland's 'air," Old
Nurse had ventured to air her opinions. "What I do say is, if you've
got to cut a boy's curls off, why, you'd better cut 'em off, and not
'ave bits of 'em left 'anging. Of course, it's a shame, but boys 'as got
to be boys, and you can't 'ave 'em goin' to school lookin' like them
little Cupids in the pictures."
"It's true that an aureole of golden curls doesn't look very well
coming out from under a bowler hat," I said to myself. Have you
ever noticed that there's hardly one grown-up man in a hundred that
can ever look decent in a bowler? A man has either to be very neat-
featured or else very ugly to carry off that sort of hat.
"Them there bowlers is all the go for little boys of Master Roland's
age, and 'is suits 'im right enough, only 'e chooses to think as it
don't, and you listens to 'im," went on the worthy old woman. "'Pon
my word, that there boy's vanity do beat anything I ever come
across in all my life. Every time that I makes 'im put that bowler on,
'e gets into such a temper as you never saw. 'E thinks as people
laughs at 'im for it, but if they does laugh, it's at 'is fatness, not at
his 'at."
"That's because all the rest of them are such skeletons," I rejoined.
"Any boy with any flesh on his bones at all would look fat compared
with them. People are so silly about thinness and fatness. They
always think of what they look like dressed, and never of what they
look like undressed. Why, half the women who go about with a
reputation for slimness and elegance would give one a start if one
saw their blade bones uncovered! And it's the same with children."
"That may be, ma'am, but it don't do away with the fact that these
children is all so enormous that people opens their eyes wide
whenever they sees 'em a-comin'. As for Master Roland, I've given
'im up. 'E 'ad the coolness to say to me to-day as my 'air was going
greyer. I told 'im that at my time of life people 'as either to 'ave their
'air go grey or else come off, and they aren't given their choice."
"I suppose you'd rather have your hair absent and black than
present and grey," I answered her without thinking what I was
saying.

"Little Yeogh Wough, you're a very small child still; but I think you'll
understand me when I tell you that you've got to a time in your life
when you'll have to be very careful about holding on to beauty," I
said to the Boy that night when I went in to see him and to have the
talk which was as regular as the coming of the night itself. "A girl
can keep her ideas of beauty always, but a boy is supposed to drop
his when he begins going to school. It's not only the cutting off of
yellow curls that I'm thinking of, but other things, too. You'll have to
hide your great love for flowers and colour and poetry."
He looked puzzled.
"Mustn't I bring you flowers any more, Big Yeogh Wough?" he
laughed then.
"Oh, yes, of course! You can show your love for beautiful things just
as much at home as ever. That's the best side of you. But you must
not talk about it to the boys, because they wouldn't understand. I'll
show you what I mean by telling you of something that your father
and I saw when we were in Paris last. We happened to go into a
fashionable tea-shop, and there we saw, sitting with his mother, a
boy who must have been eleven or twelve years old, in a white satin
suit complete and with hair as long as a girl's hanging down his
back, tied in with white satin ribbon. Now, you know, we English
believe that a boy had better be dead than be like that. Even I think
so. Of course, he was like a little prince in a fairy tale, but everyday
life isn't a fairy tale, and we don't consider white satin and long hair
manly. So it's in order to prevent anybody from thinking that you've
got any taint of unmanliness about you that you must make up your
mind now to give up pretty things for yourself and go in for boyish
plainness, and cricket and football. No one must ever think you soft
and flabby."
"I don't think anybody will ever do that," he laughed again. "I
knocked one of the boys down to-day for being impudent to me. He
was a good deal bigger than I am; so it's done me a lot of good with
the others."
I took one of his small, strong hands and clasped it in mine and held
it against my breast.
"Was this the little hand that did it?" I laughed. "Because, if so, that
is splendid. Those boys must have seen that golden curls and big
soft brown eyes can have a good deal of manly strength behind
them; and people will always respect your brains, and even your
longings for the pretty things of life, as long as they know you're
strong enough to knock them down if you want to. But you must
only use your strength against others who are just as strong. You
must never use it against your little sister and brother. Nurse says
you have been behaving badly in the nursery this evening—
interfering with the others instead of doing your home-work. Why
haven't you done your preparation?"
"Why, because the master that's got to see my home-work won't be
at school to-morrow, so it would have been all a waste. The other
boys said they weren't going to do theirs."
"And what difference does it make to you whether they do theirs or
not? How does it alter your duty? Why should you cheat yourself
because they are silly enough to cheat themselves?"
The big brown eyes looked at me blankly. I went on:
"Don't you see, Little Yeogh Wough, that it's only yourself that you
cheat when you don't do your work? It's not your master. It doesn't
matter to him. He doesn't lose anything. It's you who lose. You've
cheated yourself this evening of something that you might have had.
And you haven't been thorough. If you neglect your work often like
this, you'll get to slurring it over when you do it, so long as you think
nobody will notice the slurring; and that won't do. That will make
you grow up just like most of the other men you see around you,
and not the great, strong, wonderful man that I want you to be."
He patted my face and neck with the hand that I had left free, as I
knelt by the bedside.
"You funny Big Yeogh Wough! Nobody would expect anyone who
looks like you to talk like that," he said mischievously.
"You wise little boy!" I laughed. "No, I suppose they wouldn't. People
always make mistakes like that, you know. One day the world will
come to see that preachers may look very bright and easy-going—
just as motherly women with mob caps and three chins are not
necessarily the best persons to trust to for seeing that sheets are
properly aired. Now, good night. You must go to sleep."
I went to the window and opened it, placed the screen by his bed
just where it would shield him from the draught and from the light,
and went towards the door. As I reached it, he called me back.
"Mother, do you think we shall ever have a war with Germany?"
"A war with Germany? Why, yes, I suppose we are pretty sure to
have one some day. But whatever makes you ask that now?"
"Oh, it was only because I heard one of the masters talking about
it!"
"Well, I don't think you need trouble about it just yet, anyhow. The
best thing you can do is to sleep well and eat well and work well, so
as to grow up a fine man and be able to do something worth doing
in that war when it comes—if it ever does come."
When I had left him I stood for some minutes shaking the door
gently to make sure that it was properly shut and that he would not
be in a draught all night.
I've always had this curious difficulty in realising actual things, such
as whether I have shut a door or not, or whether I have put a jewel
away in its case properly. It has always been quite easy for me to
realise unseen things—such as a death or a fire that has not yet
occurred, or any sort of scene at which I have not been present. I
am sure that I sometimes see these more vividly than people who
have actually witnessed them with their bodily eyes. But when it
comes to ordinary everyday facts—why, I have stood irresolutely by
a trunk ten or fifteen minutes many and many a time, lifting the lid
up and down in order to make absolutely sure that something that I
had put away in under the lid was actually there and had not
jumped out again.
It was in this pernickety way (the word is beautifully expressive) that
I always guarded Little Yeogh Wough.
People accused me of only loving him so desperately because he
was good-looking. I dare say his looks went some little way with me.
I have never pretended that I should devote myself to a person with
a hare lip as well as to a person without one; and certainly the boy
of my heart, besides being glorious to look at, had a knack of
making people surround him with attractive things that added to his
own attractiveness. Whenever he went into a shop to have some
plain and practical article bought for him, he managed to choose for
himself an idealised example of the same thing, at quite double the
suggested price, and have it sent in. Prices meant nothing to him,
and at the age of seven he was not half so good a financier as his
sister of four.
"That there boy 'ull never 'ave a penny in 'is pocket in all 'is life, not
even if he gets thousands a year," Old Nurse was accustomed to say
to my secretary, who was a willing listener. "Money burns 'oles with
'im, wherever he carries it."
"Oh yes, Nurse. But he always spends it on his mother. Look at the
flowers he buys her—violets and carnations, all through the winter,
and even roses! That's really wonderful, you know, Nurse, in the
present day, when children are so selfish."
"M'yes," rejoined Old Nurse doubtfully. "But what do 'e do it for? It's
just jealousy; that's what it is, just jealousy, so as nobody else shan't
give 'is mother anything. Why, there was Miss Clare yesterday, she
spent 'er week's pocket money buyin' some roses for 'er mother, and
'e 'appened to meet us comin' home with 'em when he was walkin'
up the road with a schoolboy, and what did he do, d'you think? Why,
he ran as 'ard as he could and bought some carnations and got 'ome
with them first and gave them to 'is mother; and when the poor little
girl got in with 'er roses, she was thanked for 'em, of course, but
they wasn't worn or put on the study table. They was just put away
in the back drawing-room, where nobody never goes."
"Ah, that's it, you see!" said Miss Torry. "But, of course, Nurse, the
little girl ought to have told exactly what had happened."
"That's what I said to 'er, but she wouldn't do it. She's shy. And that
there Master Roland, 'e do override everything and everybody. He's
that spoiled that there's no——"
"Oh, come now, Nurse, you're as bad as everybody else with him!
You always say he's charming."
"Well, so 'e is. I will say this for 'im—that he never gives me a back
answer. That there Miss Clare, she could 'old 'er own so far as
tongue goes with an East-End street child. Master Roland, 'e corrects
her for it. 'E says: 'Now, Clare, you mustn't speak like that to Nurse.'
Then he told 'er as somebody called George Meredith, that their
mother thinks a lot of, said he wanted 'em all to be polite above all
things."
"That's it, you see," said Miss Torry again. She was a delightful
creature, but she always felt rather uncomfortable under Old Nurse's
severe eye.
It has always been a mystery to me why I am supposed to have
spoiled Little Yeogh Wough. My hand was always over him, invisibly
keeping him down. He had more punishments than the others had.
But he had a charm that took the sternness out of discipline and a
wonderful knack of knowing the right thing to say, and when to say
it. And he knew how to give way with a quite princely grace.
"Roland," I said to him one day, rejoining him in the car in which he
had been waiting for me outside a house where I had been paying a
formal call. "I have just heard someone say a very silly thing. She—it
was a woman—said how much more right and proper it would be if
the words under the Prince of Wales's feathers were: 'I rule,' instead
of 'I serve.' You can see the silliness of that, can't you?"
He nodded. "You told me one day that 'I serve' is much grander."
"Of course it is. Any empty-headed cock on a dirt heap can crow out
'I rule,' and it doesn't mean anything much; but it takes a great man
to say 'I serve,' and when a great man does say it you feel that he's
a king. You know, Little Yeogh Wough, empty show doesn't mean
much. We're very fond of beautiful things, you and I, but——"
"Oh, yes!" he put in. "That's why I asked you to let me come with
you to-day, because it was the first time you were wearing your new
hat."
"Yes. Beautiful things are very nice indeed, but they don't mean
much. You don't remember, do you, when we took you to the South
of France and we saw Queen Victoria arrive at Nice? We were in a
crowd of French people and they were talking about the Queen and
saying what a mighty woman she was—Empress of India, and all the
rest of it. And then she came—a little figure in a plain, ugly black
dress, and with what you would have called a plain, ugly old black
bonnet on. She wasn't helped by her clothes a bit; and yet there was
something about her that was so great and so masterful that a hush
went through that French crowd, and I knew that every man and
woman in it felt what I felt myself—that here was a human creature
so truly queenly and so truly grand, that laces and furs and jewels
would have spoiled her."
I saw the big brown eyes that were fronting mine suddenly soften
and glow.
"I like a queen better than a king," he said now. "I should like to
fight for you if you were a queen."
 CHAPTER VI
PASSING SHADOWS

It was considered to be a part of my steady spoiling of Little Yeogh

Wough that, while he was still only seven years old, I sent for him to
come over to us in Paris, where we were staying for three months at
the Hôtel Meurice.
As a matter of fact, it was in order that he might not be utterly
spoiled that I sent for him. I had very strong doubts as to the
discipline that was being kept up at the London house by the old
Nurse, under the supervision of my sweet-natured, but too gentle
and yielding, aunt.
"I don't suppose we shall know him for the same boy when he gets
out here," I said to Miss Torry, who was with us. "My aunt, you
know, is one of those dear women who always let in thin ends of
wedges all round them, and she will have had time in a fortnight to
let in a good many in his daily life."
My secretary looked grieved.
"Oh, but you must have more confidence in him than that! He's so
fine a character, even though he is only seven years old, that I don't
think he will have changed just because he may have been
differently handled. Besides, he does worship you so much. He
wouldn't do anything to vex you for the world."
"I don't know. I think it was a little dangerous of me yesterday to tell
those French people what a wonderful boy he is. For one thing, it's
always silly to praise one's own children; and secondly, it's a mistake
to praise anything or anybody to people who haven't seen them yet.
You must not even give praise that is solidly true, because, if you do,
something always happens to make it false. You say your child has a
skin as clear as the may-flower, and by the time you show him up
he's developed pimples. It's the law of Compensation again. It acts
in little things just as in big ones. Anyhow, the boy is sure to have
sincere eyes and a sincere walk, and these two things will go a long
way. So very few people have sincere movements! You've only to
look around this hotel to see that."
"I only hope he'll get here safely!" breathed Miss Torry, who was
always on the look out for disasters. "He's coming over with an
irresponsible sort of man, and accidents do happen so easily that in
the present day one can't be too careful. A precious child like that
ought to be looked after by somebody that can be trusted. Mr. P——
can't be trusted. Why, don't you remember, he took his own two-
year-old child for a drive somewhere on the East Coast last summer
and it fell out of the old victoria without his knowing it, and he'd left
it on the roadside quite a mile behind him before he missed it?"
Yes, this was true. I had forgotten this incident, and her recalling it
to my mind made me anxious. Still, this Mr. P—— had happened to
be coming over to Paris on purpose to see me on some business
matter, and the temptation to let him bring out the boy of my heart
had been too strong to resist.
Besides, the sight of Paris would do much to help forward Little
Yeogh Wough's education.
"How sorry he'll be to find you so ill and unlike yourself!" went on
Miss Torry. (I had a cold so bad that it had practically become
bronchitis, which, for some mysterious reason, usually happens to
me in Paris.) "But how delighted he'll be with your new black and
white frock, and with the hat with violets!"
Yes. Even at that early age he loved my clothes. He loved them so
much that I used sometimes to wonder if all his devotion to myself
would go if I were shabby and lived in sordid surroundings. As it is, I
ask myself now, in these later days, whom I should dress for if he
should be killed in the war.
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