CHAPTER III THE FIRST STEPS OF THE LITTLE FEET
There is nothing like smells, or clothes, for bringing back the past. The scent of the American currant will always bring my childhood back to me when even music could not do it. The hardest-hearted criminal can be softened sometimes to yielding and to tears by some smell that brings back an old home life long since forgotten. In the same way the sight of clothes worn in other days sends the memory darting back across the years. So it was with me when I was rummaging among my Little Yeogh Wough's things and found a pink linen coat and knee breeches and a little white-frilled shirt that had been worn with them.
That little pink linen suit lit up the past for me just as a lamp lights up a dark place into which it is suddenly carried.
I had a vision of yellow curls under a sailor hat and sunning out over a white embroidery collar. I saw little brown hands always finding something to do and doing it masterfully, reckless of consequences. I saw happy Christmases and birthdays made stupendously joyous by the coming of luxurious toys, which may have been wastefully extravagant, but which helped, anyhow, to build a foundation of happiness for the child and his sister and brother to look back to in after years. I saw battles in the nursery in which the Old Nurse and the under nurse were sometimes worsted and even received personal injuries. But, above all, I saw two scenes which had a bearing on the future of my Yeogh Wough, who was one day to go to the trenches in France and Flanders and fight for his country.
The first was the occasion of the christening of his newly arrived small brother. The scene was a London church, and after the christening ceremony the clergyman looked at Yeogh Wough and then spoke to me.
"This elder boy was only baptised privately, at home, I believe?"
"Yes."
"Then he ought to be received properly into the Church. I will do it now."
And he put out his hand and drew Yeogh Wough towards him.
The boy went deathly white and we who watched him knew that one of his attacks of nerves was threatening. The big, brown, velvety eyes were for a moment shrinking and wavering. Then, as if something said within him that when one is a boy of just six years old one must go forward with things and play the game, he steadied and straightened himself suddenly, lifted his big head very high—it was like the head of a lion cub—and, though his cheeks were bloodless still, went through the ceremony without faltering.
"He's got the stuff in him that heroes are made of," someone said to his father and to me. "He'd go to martyrdom just in the same way."
The other scene that stands out took place half a year earlier, when he was five and a half. He had been down on a visit to some relatives in the country and was talking about a particular pond which he had seen. Then his father began to tell him the story of how the famous American preacher Theodore Parker, when he was a little boy, was standing one day by a pond, looking at a beautiful flower that grew at its edge, when a frog suddenly came up out of the water. Young Parker took up a stone to kill the frog, but stopped because a voice within him, which was the voice of his conscience, told him that it would be wrong to take the harmless creature's life.
"Yes, fa'ver," Little Yeogh Wough nodded wisely. "I know about that voice. I've heard it, too. I'm hearing it now."
"You're hearing it now, Roland? What do you mean?"
"Why, down at Uncle Jack's there were some nice round things, all white and red and smooth, and I wanted them and I asked Auntie May if I could have them and she said: 'No, Yoland, you can't have them, because they're ivowy card counters.' And I didn't like her telling me I couldn't have them, so I took them when she was gone out, and I've bwought them up here to London wiv' me. Nurse doesn't know. I've got them now. But I don't feel as if I want them now."
"No, of course not. That was very wrong of you. You must go and get them at once and give them up to your mother or to me and we will send them back to Auntie May and tell her that you are very sorry."
"Yes, I've been sorry ever since I bwought them up."
A little blue silk suit flashed my thoughts back to a garden party which the weather turned into an indoor party, and at which Little Yeogh Wough made himself a small Master of the Ceremonies, taking away from his smaller sister an ice which she had secretly captured and conducting her upstairs on the pretext that at three and a half years old she was too young to take part in social affairs. How the gay, brave little feet went about that day, with the joy of the May-time in the house, in spite of the rain, and outside all the glamour and the glory of a London that as yet knew not the Great War!
There is an American song in which a mother declares that she never raised her son to be a soldier. I never raised my son to be a soldier. I thought he had too much brain power for the Army, especially if there was to be no war. And yet I was making him a soldier every day, and, above all, every night.
For every night of his life, from the time he was two years old, I had gone to see him in bed, as he phrased it. Now and again there was a break in these nightly visits, when I had to go out to dinner, and especially to an unusually early dinner; but, except for these rare breaks, I never failed the child in these good-night talks.
"Come and see me in bed, mother," was his regular appeal after his good-night kiss. And I went, and after hearing him say his prayers I knelt down by his bedside and talked to him, sometimes for a whole hour.
Not that he and I had long talks at these particular times only. All day long, until his school days came, we were together. I never talked down to him or tried to make myself a child for him. It was he who was always trying to reach up to me. When I brushed my hair or looked over my clothes or dressed for some affair or other, he was in my room always and I talked to him in French, until he came to know in a tender easy way that tongue which has been of so much use to him in this past year of the War, when, as adjutant, and as Mess President of his battalion, he has needed to do a good deal of talking with people who haven't a word of English. He would hear me repeating snatches of poetry, too, and afterwards, when he was alone, he could be heard saying them over to himself in a way which showed that he perfectly grasped their meaning. He walked with me, drove with me, watched me at my work, and, as soon as he was able to read, began to read to me. For I had hurt my eyes by overwork then and could not read to myself. It was my Compensation for having him and for having at the same time a little—a very little—worldly success.
This belief in Compensation has become a part of my life now and stops my natural gaiety. I have never had a happy day yet or a whole-hearted laugh without paying for it. This is what makes me afraid now that Yeogh Wough is coming home on his second leave. A man who is fighting for his country does not come home unwounded on his second leave without something happening.
Oh, if people would only see this and take care! But they are blind to instances of it that are about them every day. Lord Roberts bought his Boer War successes with the death of his son. Lieutenant Warneford paid for his double V.C. with his life when he next went up into the air. And so on.
At night, when I knelt by Yeogh Wough's bedside till my knees were sore, the things we talked of were different. We put Henley and Browning and Stevenson and others of their kind aside then and I spoke to him of what boyhood means and what manhood means; of the glories of manly work, such as engineering, shipbuilding, inventing, and the need for hard striving and straight living.
"You must never be feeble, Little Yeogh Wough. Feebleness is a thing that nobody can forgive, except in old people and children. It's better to be strong in doing bad things than not strong at all. But you'll get to know when you grow up that badness is only a funny kind of weakness. You must be strong. Look at Kitchener! He's got on by being strong and thorough. They say that when the rails came for the building of the Soudan railway he examined every yard of metal himself, not trusting to other people. That's thoroughness."
I taught him what patriotism means.
He had lived through the Boer War, though it had found him hardly more than four years old. He had seen a woman burst into tears in the street when a regiment of Highlanders swung past, and I had told him why she had done so and all about Magersfontein. I had told him the story of the American Civil War, lighting it up with such things as the story of the play "Secret Service." I had put great figures up as models for him, and among them was the figure of Cecil Rhodes. I had taught him that the least little thing he did, even so small a thing as the mending of a toy, must be done thoroughly, because he was British born and had the British repute to keep up. And then together, he with his curly head on the pillow and his hand clasping mine as I knelt beside the bed, we would repeat poems by 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.