And she couldn't get him to protect himself from drafts by night. He'd insist on having a window wide open, and when she'd sneak back to close it so he wouldn't catch his death of cold he'd get up and court destruction by hoisting it again. And once when she'd crept in and shut it a second time he threw two shoes through the upper and lower parts so it would always be open. He claimed he done this in his sleep, having got into the habit in the trenches when he'd come in from a long march and someone would close all the windows. But Arline said that this only showed that war had made him a rowdy, even in his sleep—and out of the gentlest-mannered boy that ever wore velvet garments and had a cinch on every prize in the Sunday school; though she did not use coarse words like that. She told me herself it was time we got this other side of what war did to gently nurtured youths that had never soiled their lips with an oath in their lives until they went into war's hell. She said just that!
Also Shelley had contracted the vicious habit of smoking, which was all a body would want to know about war. She said he'd have his breakfast in bed, including whole slices of ham, which comes from the most loathsome of all animals, and would then lie and smoke the Lord Byron five-cent cigar, often burning holes in the covers, which he said was another old trench habit—and that showed what war done to the untainted human soil. Also while smoking in bed he would tell little Keats things no innocent child should hear, about how fine it feels to deflate Germans with a good bayonet. She had never esteemed Lord Byron as a poet, and these cigars, she assures me, was perfectly dreadful in a refined home, where they could be detected even in the basement.
Little Keats was now thirteen, with big joints and calf knees showing under the velvet pants, and I guess his curls was all that persuaded his mother to live, what with Shelley having gone to the bad and made a name for himself like Bugs. But little Keats had fell for his brother, and spent all the time he could with him listening to unpretty stories of Germans that had been fixed up proper the way the good Lord meant 'em to be.
After he'd been home a couple weeks or more Shelley begun to notice little Keats more closely. He looked so much like Shelley had at that age and had the same set-on manner in the house that Shelley got suspicious he was leading the same double life he had once led himself.
He asked his mother when she was going to take Keats to a barber, and his mother burst into tears in the old familiar way, so he said no more to her. But that afternoon he took little Keats out for a stroll and closely watched his manner toward some boys they passed. They went on downtown and Shelley stepped into the Owl cigar store to get a Lord Byron. When he come out little Keats was just finishing up a remark to another boy. It had the familiar ring to Shelley and was piquant and engaging even after three years in the trenches, where talk is some free. Keats still had the angel face, but had learned surprisingly of old English words.
Then Shelley says to him: "Say, kid, do you like your curls?" And little
Keats says very warmly and almost shedding tears: "They're simply hell!"
"I knew it," says Shelley. "Have many fights?"
"Not so many as I used to," says Keats.
"I knew that, too," says Shelley. "Now, then, you come right along with me."
So he marches Keats and curls down to Henry Lehman's and says: "Give this poor kid a close haircut."